Franchise First Look Checklist

You’ve created your new IP or IP sequel/spin off/redux. Doesn’t matter if you are a first-time creator or a great big muscular studio. If you want that IP to perform as a commercial franchise, there are many others who are going to look at what you’ve done and decide if you have achieved that potential. Internal licensing groups must be able to pitch your IP to potential licensees, and those future partners must be able to see actionable potential in your story for their category.

Each licensee knows their own business quite well and has a shorthand for filtering concepts. Interest for most evaluations are decided in the first five minutes of viewing the IP.?

As with all IP being shopped to licensees, a robust distribution and marketing plan must be in place to drive awareness and audience experience. I am not including this in the checklist below because it is a price of entry. These factors are also not about the creative decisions made to shape the final product.

No matter how much the technology or product and distribution options evolve, there are still five basic measures that make up the first impression checklist for your IP, shared by most licensees. Those are:?

·????? Relevance – Is the meaning of your IP something that will resonate with the right audience...today and tomorrow? Relevance means your story is not just cool to watch, but interesting and useful once the primary entertainment has been experienced. When Harry Potter launched, it was hyper-relevant to Millennials and its multi-category growth was fueled by it. The last decade’s tidal wave of superhero movies only have a few characters and storylines that one could consider strongly relevant. This is a key factor in the decline of audience support for the genre. Simply extending the context of any story is not enough to keep up with relevance.

·????? Attention getting – What about your IP immediately makes it stand out in those first few seconds? Why is it ownably different from what has come before? Special effects worked as an element in getting noticed, but today’s effects-soaked entertainment landscape is making that factor less and less of a differentiator. Is your overall concept breakout? Are your designs making for gotta-have characters? Have you pushed the envelope in terms of art direction (SpiderVerse first launch)? There are many ways to standout. Having multiple reasons why your creation is an attention magnet is difficult in a time when sequels and known quantities are getting greenlit more often than new concepts. Even if the IP already exists, approaching development of the next installment in its growth must include immediate reasons why the work will get attention in a crowded marketplace of stories.

·????? Theming – Is the theme of your story one that lends itself to easy understanding and translation to broader expression? Pixar’s Cars takes advantage of one of the biggest of the big themes for boys...cars. Compare this to Dreamworks’ Turbo. Though a good story and beautifully produced movie, it is about a snail. As a good friend of mine said to me relative to evaluating the potential of the IP: “When you walk into a boy’s room, you’re stepping on cars not snails.” Theming and recognizability is very important for kid’s and all-family properties. That being said, a truly well-crafted story can take something or someone who is not part of a familiar archetype and turn them/it into something powerful. There is a short Italian plumber who battles things to help a princess that the world loves. Before Mario, I don’t think anyone would have said that plumbers were heroes for kids. Archetypes are powerful, so choosing to step away from them when you are shooting for big commercial success is choosing a rare and tough road. For adults you have a great deal more latitude, but it comes along with the understanding that your story must explain your invented theme and make it important first before it can expand widely. Even then, we all still have the kid in us that looks for the emotional simplicity of something we understand. Take James Cameron’s Avatar. Some wildly new ideas throughout the story but...it is riding the Banshees (flying dragons) that fulfill a broadly held fantasy for the audience. It is no wonder that the animatronic Banshees purchased at the theme park are the hot item from the movies.

·????? Worldbuilding – Is the world that has been built one that invites your audience to return over and over? Ultra-dangerous, depressing, and drab worlds have their place in dark action or paranormal romance, but if what you are creating is a kids or four quadrant franchise, that kind of world tends not to perform well beyond the main story. ?Delivering a place of wonder that is chock full of opportunities for your audience to use their agency is one of the biggest factors in determining if a property is significantly commercially franchisable. This also means going beyond creating interesting sets to support the scenes and sequences of your story. Understanding how to include elements, ideas, and broader concepts that expand beyond the primary story is a key creative and commercial skill.

·????? Agency – Does the meaning of your story, your characters, and your worldbuilding all combine to activate your audience to use their own agency? If the meaning of your story has inspired your audience, they now want to explore that idea for themselves. That can take the form of social expression, gaming, toys, collecting, fashion, experiences, and many other existing and emerging categories. This too goes beyond putting wondrous or cool things throughout the world. The elements in the story that are involved in your character’s use of agency on screen are the ones most likely to inspire your audience’s desire to use them as well. There is a much deeper discussion to be unpacked about how the meaning of the story comes to life in the most powerful non-character elements in the story, and how the elements that become powerful metaphors for the meaning also become the strongest expansions of the story. I will do a future article on just that drill down.

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Net/net, your story must score high on these five key measures in order to move to the next level of consideration and ultimately commercial franchise success.

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Cheers, Kevin