 Quotes •  Headscratchers •  Playing With • Useful Notes •  Analysis •  Image Links •  Haiku • Laconic
|
|---|
 |
"I think we might have killed the franchise."
|
 |
Sometimes a sequel sucks. Sometimes it sucks, but leaves the possibility open that the followup will be better and that this is just a blip in the quality of the franchise. Then sometimes it sucks so much that it kills the franchise stone dead, destroying the producers'/publishers' hopes for further sequels.
Occasionally a few Franchise Killers over too short a period (or one really bad one) can put a whole genre out of favour for a while. Even the executives could tell when it's time to stop following the leader.
Note that sometimes the franchise turns out to be Not Quite Dead, and can be salvaged with a Continuity Reboot or simply ignoring the killer. Just as often, however, this revival turns out to be a flop and kills the franchise twice over. If the franchise experiences what should have been a Franchise Killer but carries on regardless with few to no improvements, it's a Franchise Zombie.
Occasionally it's a Stillborn Franchise, an all-new product for which plans for sequels were made and then scrapped when it was discovered that the product was crap, or so hyped up that the creators have unrealistic expectations of its success. Or it just didn't profit enough, even though it was a Cult Classic. If the Franchise that was killed also happened right as the creators were setting up for a new installment to the series, it will overlap with Cut Short.
Examples of Franchise Killer include:
Live-Action TV[]
- Fantasy Leader, a Blogspot user, created a detailed essay on what was almost the Franchise Killer for Super Sentai here. To recap: the coincidental collision of a gradual Broken Base that built up starting with Chikyuu Sentai Fiveman five years ago (within the fandom) and a pair of Genre Killing real-life incidents (outside of the fandom[1]) led to show ratings falling to a new low in Chouriki Sentai Ohranger and Toei was prepared to pull the plug... until they noticed that Ohranger toy sales somehow reached a monstrous new high for Sentai overall.
- Power Rangers has had a few run-ins with this trope; first, there was Power Rangers Turbo, which had a sudden shift towards overt and painful comedy in the second half, as well as a replacement of the whole team, notably with the incredibly annoying new Blue Ranger. It took the Darker and Edgier Power Rangers in Space, intended as a Grand Finale, to set things straight. Power Rangers Operation Overdrive got it even worse, with Disney deciding to abandon the franchise after the failure of the season thanks to poor writing, an awful theme song, and annoying characters. Power Rangers RPM was then chosen to be the final season, until Saban bought the rights back. From there, Power Rangers Ninja Steel was so bad, riddled with dry cardboard characters, unfunny comic relief, annoying cartoony sound effects, moronic writing, nonsensical Megazord design (including selling auxillary Zords only in packs with recolored Megazords), talking down to the audience, and fart jokes ahoy, that it not only nearly killed the franchise which was already suffering after the disappointment of Megaforce, it also forced Saban to sell their entertainment assets to Hasbro! This wasn't quite enough to save the franchise as we know it, as Cosmic Fury became the last season to use Super Sentai assets directly.
- Stargate Universe was a Soap Opera IN SPACE! that couldn't be less like Stargate. Unlike many of these examples, it had a nice little fanbase, but not enough to keep it afloat, and with its failure came the official announcement of the indefinite hiatus of the awaited Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis projects - the kind of 'hiatus' that means you start dismantling sets.
- Heroes Volumes 3 and 4 (both making up season 3) qualify as such. The second season was a major letdown, but people forgave it because there was the big writer's strike and The Powers That Be did the best they could. When season three came along, they expected a return to form, but got a Random Events Plot with characters acting wildly Out of Character as the writers seemed to be changing their minds on key plot points three times per episode. Best known is Sylar's being more evil, then less evil, then more, then less constantly, but really, it was like that with everything. By the end of that season, most of the fans had given up on it. Season four (Volume 5) got to happen, and was better than season three but it wasn't without its problems, and really, by then, nobody cared anymore. Because of this, not only is the TV series cancelled, but the graphic novels were also scrapped as well. However, in 2015 they got the greenlight for a new series called Heroes Reborn. This wasn't able to save the franchise; though, as it bombed and the property hasn't been touched since.
- Unless you count its appearance on Game Show Marathon in 2006, no new episodes of Card Sharks have ever been seen on American TV since the 2001 version, which was a disaster and which may have also been the reason why Pearson left the TV business...not long after "Card Guppies" ended, Fremantle Media bought out all of Pearson's assets. While Fremantle has made many revivals of other Goodson/Todman game shows, some more successful than others, they barely even touched Card Sharks, and when they did, it was moderately unsucsessful and was killed off by the pandemic.
- Metal Heroes died from the "Tack" (Kabutack and Robotack) sub-series, which were overly child-oriented and had a completely different formula from the previous installments. After the end of these, no further Metal Heroes TV shows were greenlit, and it wasn't until 2012 when the characters started appearing in other shows. The "Tack" series is rarely acknowledged by Toei, and hasn't received any home media releases other than the crossover special. This was to the point that Saban refused to even touch the "Tack" sub-series and instead produce their own original Toku in Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation and The Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog. This too was curtailed by the failure of Los Luchadores and the sale of Saban to Disney, which led to them working on only Power Rangers from then on, with even the anime dubs given to a different studio before the rights expired. The early Neo-Saban era attempted to do Kamen Rider adaptations (which were even more stillborn as the last attempt), but by the time the entertainment assets of Saban were sold to Hasbro, Metal Heroes characters had started to be adapted into Power Rangers as supporting characters.
- To date, Satria Garuda BIMA-X marks as the last installment of the Satria Garuda franchise created by Reino Barack and Ishimori Productions, due to the former marrying (and currently prioritizing his life to) with the controversial Indonesian pop singer Syahrini in 2019.
Music[]
- After the violence at Woodstock '99, the owners of the Woodstock name have gone on record to say it will never be used again. There have been a few unofficial attempts to revive Woodstock, but none have stuck or done well.
- ↑ The sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway and the Great Hanshin Earthquake, both in March of that year, made the 1995 season's Darker and Edgier plot very untenable.