Honey, We Shrunk the Franchises

There’s no reason why Dune: Prophecy should fail. An extension of Frank Herbert’s wild, heady, lore-heavy Dune universe, Prophecy came to HBO on the heels of the significant market success, critical acclaim, and widespread cultural saturation of two enormous movies starring some of the most famous young actors of their generation. Dune: Prophecy is not a perfect show, but that’s never stopped series like WandaVision, The Mandalorian, and the first season of House of the Dragon from capturing broad appeal and spawning memes, merchandise, huge publicity investments, and the brief, pleasant sense that for a little while, at least, everyone was watching the same TV show. And Dune: Prophecy is fun! Or, it’s fun enough — there’s a whole planet that survives via an economy of space-whale meat, and women of a certain age wear magisterial priestess robes that whisper against stone floors as they walk quickly through dark hallways, and sometimes hot young people have drug-fueled sex that makes them tell secrets they should not be telling. Evidence of the past several years suggests TV viewers long for a big, expansive series everyone can glom onto together, something that extends from a previous fictional world to give it some built-in cultural associations. Why not Dune: Prophecy?

Why not The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, for that matter? Or HBO’s The Penguin, which is a little bit like Garfield without Garfield, except for Batman? Or Disney+’s recent Star Wars series The Acolyte or its even more recent Star Wars series Skeleton Crew? There’s no starving for choice in the franchise TV landscape of 2024, and next year promises more of the same, including a new FX Alien show, a new Daredevil, and more of The Last of Us and Andor. But especially in 2024, none of the big bids for buzzy, year-defining TV have translated into more than a blip. Star Wars obsessives surely watched The Acolyte, and Tolkien obsessives watched The Rings of Power, and even though The Penguin picked up some viewers who wanted to watch a Mafia show, it never delivered a groundswell of Penguin-mania. This was not the year the franchise died, not when there are still so many of them and plenty more on the way. But it is the year franchises stopped delivering on their promise of expansive, continual growth. Franchises, designed to keep rolling up new audience members into a bigger and bigger cultural wave, have instead gotten small.

The franchise is built on the classic tech-utopian belief that growth can be infinite. New installments in the Star Wars universe carry with them everything that’s already happened in this fictional world — in all the films, in the new TV shows, and in whichever of the novels later designated as canonical. New Star Wars shows and new Star Wars movies can keep being spun off from previous versions while retaining all the characters and world building and design language and musical themes and map expansion every previous title ever had. Plus each new project has the potential to bring in new viewers who enter the whole franchise ecosystem and should get carried along just like all the characters inside the story, an ever-expanding audience that mirrors the perpetually growing interior logic of the fictional world. Why should it ever stop? Growth forever, baby! Instead, 2024 television made it clear that fictional worlds could potentially expand forever, but audiences would not follow the same trajectory. Every new title is not an opportunity to bring in new viewers but rather a potential off-ramp, a moment that forces a choice to either continue the not-insignificant work of keeping up with something or give it up and try some other show. (Or not; there are so many TikToks to watch.) Franchise fatigue kicks in as soon as each new title becomes required homework for appreciating whatever else is waiting in the pipeline.

In one way, these diminishing returns are less about the failure of the franchise TV show as a concept and more about franchises succumbing to the same thing that’s happened to so many streaming and premium cable series of all genres and styles over the last five years. Nichification has meant more shows with fewer viewers for each, but in the early Peak TV era, big franchise productions like Jessica Jones, The Witcher, or The Umbrella Academy were exceptions. Name recognition mattered more than ever in a crowded landscape; fondness for known characters and the thrill of a new take on a familiar world became a shortcut for the much more challenging marketing work of getting audiences excited for a thing they’d never heard of before. The high-penetration cultural impact of The Mandalorian (Baby Yoda!!!) was a gravity-defying feat, catapulted even farther by being one of the first major shows to launch on the then brand-new Disney+ platform.

But Dune: Prophecy has become an unintentionally helpful illustration of what giant fantasy franchises now promise on TV. The irresistible new-plus-old equation is actually much, much harder to pull off than it seems on paper, and as the novelty of huge franchise TV storytelling has worn off in general, the execution of each individual series now matters in a way it simply did not when House of the Dragon’s first season became a talky HBO breakout and even Obi-Wan scraped together five Emmy nominations. Dune: Prophecy’s dials are a little off. It cannot always decide if it’s a hyperserious show about religious fixation or a murderous revenge series, and it’s heavily embedded in the lore of its larger universe, which is much easier to follow for people who’ve recently seen both Dune movies and ideally have also read some of Frank Herbert’s (frankly batshit) book series. By attempting to be a little bit of many different things, it’s mostly a not-quite-complete version of any of those things, and nothing about it feels either like an essential part of the Dune universe or an essential piece of television on its own terms. It’s just like the vast majority of television today. Being part of a franchise is no longer an important or even all-that-notable distinguishing feature. There are too many other shows, too many other cinematic universes desperate to be born. When most things become a franchise, it no longer matters when anything is.

The most telling example of this phenomenon in 2024 is not a franchise show itself but Armando Ianucci’s The Franchise, an HBO satirical comedy about a first AD (not the director) struggling along in the absurd and unfeeling world of trying to make a major franchise feature film. Daniel, played by Himesh Patel, fights a constant war of pragmatism versus creative impulse. Every moment is a battle to keep his budget, to get things done without causing injuries or irreparable insult, and to capture this story for the screen without losing his mind or angering the rabid, irrational fanbase. When it works, it is a fantastic and even sometimes biting indictment of what it’s like inside the story machinery. A plotline about needing to rework the story to incorporate product placement culminates in somehow adding footage of Chinese tractors to a movie about superheroes on an alien planet. Panic over gender representation ends with an ambitious, underinformed producer cheerfully inventing a new in-universe weapon that undoes the logic of the entire film. Meanwhile, another movie in the same franchise has set up on the soundstage next door and is clearly draining all of their resources.

A few years ago, when The Avengers were still a serious draw and The Mandalorian was new, the ground would have been ripe for The Franchise. The lines between the satire and its satirized object would’ve been clear. Instead, The Franchise came and went with little fanfare and even less cultural footprint, because the thing The Franchise was making fun of — the presumption of franchise storytelling as a tooth-rattling, inescapable blockbuster device — no longer existed on TV this year. The giants are now merely, stubbornly, life-size.