To Infinity and Beyond! Franchising in Transmedia Storytelling

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To Infinity and Beyond!

Franchising in Transmedia Storytelling

Student: Wessel Schillemans Date of Completion: 27-06-2014

Supervisor: Sebastian Scholz Second Reader: Dr. J.A.A. Simons MA Thesis New Media and Digital Culture Department of Media Studies University of Amsterdam

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Word Count: 17.087

Maintaining the intrinsic value of a big media franchise that has been built carefully, with products across all kinds of different media, is not as easy as it may sound. A recent example of difficulties that can arise is the accumulation of news surrounding the Star Wars franchise and its canon. All of this started in April 2014, when ex-employees of game developer Red Fly shared their stories about the development of a Star Wars videogame that eventually was canceled.

According to the (anonymous) ex-employees, this videogame, with villain Darth Maul as its playable protagonist, was supposed to be tied with the animation series Star Wars: The

Clone Wars (2008-2014). However, Red Fly was only provided with ‘sparse details and vague

hints to prevent any kind of leaks’ (Prell) by video game publisher LucasArts, about the upcoming plots of the animation series. Partly because of that, the communication between the game developer and the higher-ups was arduous. By the time Star Wars creator George Lucas decided Darth Maul should team-up in-game with Darth Talon, a character from the

Star Wars comics that lived almost two centuries later than Darth Maul did, the levels of

confusion and miscommunication were at its highest. At the end of the story, the Darth Maul centered game was canceled, mainly because of these confusing relationships between Red Fly, LucasArts and George Lucas (Prell). This example shows how difficult storytelling can be, since the production of it happens through different levels and via different products at the same time. Nowadays, there is the idea that fans of franchises do not want the stories they love to be separated from each other; all of the stories should take place in the exact same universe and should not contradict each other -narratively speaking - which explains the outrage among Star Wars fans a few weeks later.

Through an official blog post on StarWars.com1_{, LucasArts ended months of rumors about}

almost all products becoming non-canon, by stating that, indeed, all stories except for the six main films and the animation series The Clone Wars, are now officially non-canon. In other

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words: all narrative events in all Star Wars videogames, comics and books that tell stories different from the stories in the films en series, are no longer integral to the overarching plot. If for instance one of the main characters dies in one of the comics, this does not influence the storyline of the upcoming film Star Wars Episode VII (scheduled for 2015).2_{It is exactly this}

fact that illustrates how transmedia storytelling moves people and how it can influence both the creative and commercial sides of storytelling in transmedia franchises nowadays. Transmedia storytelling is a concept defined by several scholars in several ways. Henry Jenkins is one of the names that will probably immediately pop up in the minds of new media scholars, but scholars such as Scolari (who is, in my opinion, responsible for some of the most detailed and explicated case studies) and Michael Kackman (one of the few to historicize transmedia) are responsible for important additions as well. In chapter two, I will elaborate on these different definitions and various contemporary focuses on transmedia storytelling. But for the sake of introducing the concept, the – arguably - among scholars best known and used definition is one by Henry Jenkins, who started writing about the subject in 2003. He claims that in a transmedia storytelling case

each medium does what it does best — so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained enough to enable autonomous consumption. That is, you don't need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice-versa (2003).

Most of the time, essays and books involving transmedia storytelling focus on transmedia in entertainment – this thesis does so as well - but the concept is also being used for educational purposes. For instance, think of learning programs based on a television show that involve applications for tablets and teach children mathematics or a new language through playful exercises. Sometimes these entertainment and educational purposes even overlap without that being the intention of the transmedia product. A fine example of this is that of a Norwegian high school teacher, who decided to use a video game with its origins in a transmedia franchise, to teach his students ethics. In The Walking Dead (2012 – present), a game about survivors of a zombie apocalypse that serves as a transmedia extension of the comic and television series, players have to make choices throughout the game, such as trying to save a character or bringing themselves into safety. Each of these choices can influence the rest of the storyline and some of them create dilemmas in an ethical sense: exactly the sort of teaching material ethics teacher Tobias Staaby was looking for (Mosley).

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Even though a world without transmedia storytelling is something one cannot imagine, I strongly feel that certain elements of transmedia storytelling’s academic literature need improvements. This is not a reproach towards other scholars; since the field is quite young and still evolving it is normal that not all possible approaches have been elaborated already. That is why I set out to answer the question: how can transmedia storytelling analyses be

improved in general? I will do so in this thesis by underling the following three viewpoints

where our knowledge involving transmedia storytelling can still improve:

i) create a better understanding of transmedia storytelling’s history and non-static meaning ii) explain what, in my understanding, is transmedia franchising, and explain how producers use franchising strategies to their fullest extent

iii) clarify why I think transmedia studies should not only focus on convergence but on divergence as well

I will do so by analyzing transmedia and its franchising strategies, through already existing literature on transmedia and related concepts and by analyzing different transmedia platforms. In chapter two, “Transmedia Storytelling Throughout the Years and Now”, I will provide the reader with several definitions and interpretations around the concept of transmedia storytelling. Various examples, both commonly used and lesser known ones, shall illustrate these concepts. I will also historicize the concept, for many people belief that transmedia is inherently linked with the digital age, while I disagree with that point of view. In doing do, I will also pitch a new definition of transmedia storytelling, one that is less static and more dynamic, by proposing a new categorization that suits the evolving nature of the field. After creating a clear picture of contemporary transmedia studies and how it can be improved, in chapter three I will introduce my main case study Disney Infinity (2013) in order to show why present-day ways of analyzing transmedia storytelling are not always sufficient, and start analyzing in a way that should help solve the problems I found involving the field. Disney has been a transmedia company for many decades now and since releasing their latest videogame platform Disney Infinity, they once again proved to be an innovative player in the transmedia field. With Disney Infinity, Disney shows how far the limits of transmedia reach. Buzz Lightyear’s famous oneliner “To infinity… and beyond!” from Toy Story (1995), a franchise that (as one of many brands) finds itself back in Disney Infinity, has never been more appropriate.

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After introducing my main case study, I will introduce the concept of franchising in chapter four. Many transmedia studies analyze the subject from the consumer’s point of view, but equally interesting is to understand transmedia from a producer’s viewpoint. After

introducing the concept of franchising in general, I explain how franchising emerges in transmedia with the use of five different transmedia franchising strategies: marketing in its well-known forms, seriality, transpopularity, merchandising and user-generated content. Chapter five will involve a re-examination of the convergence/divergence discourse. Many scholars tend to relate convergence to transmedia, but choose to exclude divergence in their understandings of the concept. In my opinion, this discourse should be revised, since current developments in the transmedia field ask for a more balanced way of discussing both

convergence and divergence. To illustrate the points I make in chapters four and five, I will again analyze Disney Infinity.

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2. TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING THROUGHOUT THE YEARS AND NOW

While transmedia storytelling cannot be defined and historicized without the help of Henry Jenkins, such as his original definition that I shared with you in the introduction, definitions by other scholars definitely help broaden our understanding of the concept in general. In this chapter I will provide you with several of those interpretations of transmedia storytelling and although they are not opposing each other, each of them is important to elucidate the

contemporary meaning of the concept. I will also dive into history in order to trace back the origins of transmedia storytelling, and shall begin to slightly re-define the way scholars should look at it with the view to make it broader and more understandable. With the help of several examples of transmedia products, I will illustrate these points of view.

2.1 Defining Transmedia Storytelling

While defining the contemporary definition and explain diverse viewpoints towards

transmedia storytelling, let me – for clarity’s sake - repeat Jenkins’ definition that was already quoted in the introduction:

each medium does what it does best — so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained enough to enable autonomous consumption. That is, you don't need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice-versa. (2003)

An important part of the current notion of transmedia above that needs to be emphasized, is that the stories really expand the ‘original’ story. According to contemporary definitions, transmedia storytelling is often mistaken as re-telling the same story through another medium. A fine example comes from Peter Gutierrez’s 2012 essay ‘Every Platform Tells a Story’: when Suzanne’s Collins’s book The Hunger Games was adapted to a film, it was the same

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story told in a new medium, and thus not an example of what academics consider to be transmedia (34). Re-telling the same story with relatively minor changes – such as small events that happened in the book, but are omitted in the film because filmmakers consider it not that important for the over-all plot – is generally known as crossmedia. One of many examples is the almost complete absence of the character Hagrid in the Harry Potter and the

Half-Blood Prince (2009) film, who suddenly pops up in the film, mourning his lifetime

spider friend Aragog. This is a sudden event in the film, while readers of the book – the film’s source material – could have seen this event coming: they know that Aragog has been sick and taken care of by Hagrid throughout many fictional months before his death. But even though there are several of these kinds of differences between the story told in the book and the story told through the film; the narrative is still generally the same and thus ‘simply’ an adaptation. It is a traditional strategy successfully used by media companies for many

decades, and there is nothing wrong with that, it is just not what transmedia is all about in the contemporary sense.

Jenkins also underlines that a transmedia product should be self-contained. This is

emphasized by writer and transmedia creator Jasmina Kallay - she even goes one step further explaining this important element of transmedia storytelling. According to her, a transmedia narrative should never force the consumer to experience other stories through other platforms, but has to make sure that the consumer’s interest in the storyworld is build up naturally (92). In other words: the general trend in the contemporary transmedia landscape is that a consumer should never feel as if something crucial to the product’s general storyline was withhold, only to let them shake out their wallets for the complete story. The public should never feel

cheated. For transmedia companies however, this does not mean they cannot cheat on them. They just have to make sure they do not leave any evidence behind.

In chapter four, I will go further into this grey area of attracting more consumers while not forcing people to experience the many other transmedia products of a franchise, yet I do already want to underscore how important it is for companies to smartly suggest that there are more stories to enjoy. Neil Perryman makes a very true comment in his analysis of the transmedia franchise Doctor Who where he states that that transmedia formats

should also contain enough extra-value for them to be worth seeking out and consuming in the first place, either by adding extra levels of ‘additive comprehension’, or by providing more background history or character development to help shape the world the franchise is trying to create. (33)

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It is exactly here where the real challenge of transmedia storytelling can be found, but again; I will leave you with this for now.

Now that we know how transmedia storytelling can be theorized, and know what is not transmedia storytelling, I would like to give a recent example of both that I actually quite enjoy myself: The Walking Dead. Started as a comic book series in 2003, The Walking Dead is about survivors of a zombie apocalypse that takes place in the present. These different survivors, who all have lost many people they loved, have to survive in a dystopian society, full of so-called ‘walkers’ – the equivalent of zombies – and other people that will do anything to survive. Since 2009, a television show based on the comics is being broadcasted through television channel AMC in the United States, and in many other countries as well. This relationship between comics and television can generally be considered to be a crossmedia relationship; although the narrative of the television series is not one hundred percent the same and sometimes even follows a different chronology, in general viewers watch the same story as they might have read in the comic books. At the other hand, the differences between comics and television series can sometimes be so large, that the franchise can be considered transmedia storytelling as well: some sub-storylines are discontinued, and several characters died earlier or did not die at all compared to the chronology and story of the source material.

However, The Walking Dead’s franchise also contains a video game and it is especially this product that changes the description of the franchise. The graphic adventure game The

Walking Dead is being released in episodes and is currently in its second season. The video

game takes place in the exact same universe as the comics and therefore television series, but follows a completely different storyline with mostly unique characters. Whenever you cross a character that originates from the comic books, the writers have made sure the events that take place will not embrangle the events previously covered through other media. Therefore, the video game does not even come close to an adaptation. Add the fact that the video game can be played and its story can be understood without any knowledge of the comics and/or television series and one can conclude that the existence of this video game is the reason why

The Walking Dead is, without a doubt, a fine example of transmedia storytelling. In fact, its

release through different episodes is a great example of seriality, an important transmedia franchising strategy, but more on that will follow in chapter 4.

A more extensive example of transmedia storytelling, and one already analyzed by Carlos Alberto Scolari, surrounds television series 24 (2001-present). I will give you a summary of Scolari’s most important comments and findings, since he has a specific point of view on

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transmedia storytelling himself. Scolari believes that transmedia storytelling as a concept “could be enriched if analyzed from a semio-narratological point of view.” (586) He also hopes that this using this specific approach helps finding and developing other potential successful approaches to critically address transmedia storytelling and certain cases (586-587). According to Scolari, texts are narratively structured and not linguistic per se. It is the narrative what structures a text into its essential production (591). In 24’s case, the fictional world exists of the following types of texts: the television series itself, graphic novels, a console, mobile, board and online game, paperback novels, action figures, soundtracks, a feature film, trading card games and an enormous amount of weblogs and wikis developed by

24 fans themselves (594-595). The (transmedia) storyworld of 24 is much bigger than the

storyworld of The Walking Dead currently is.

There are different sorts of (implicit) consumers that consume these texts, and every text has at least one kind of implicit consumers in mind when being produced (592). Although there are several ways to divide the different types of readers, Scolari uses what I would call a trichotomy of (trans)media consumers in order to narratively analyze 24, classified through their relationship with different media: single text consumers, single media consumers, and transmedia consumers. Single text consumers experience only one text; this can be a

videogame, watching the episodes when they are being broadcasted. Single media consumers focus on one specific medium: for instance, they enjoy the television series through

broadcasts, but also by re-watching the series using DVD’s.3_{Transmedia consumers are even}

more committed to the fictional world; they experience the overarching story through different media (597). This particular approach towards transmedia consumers seems very fruitful to me from a producer’s side, since it can help thinking of ways to approach the incredibly differentiated sorts of consumers. A somewhat simplified distinction would suggest a difference between the casual fans and the hardcore fans of a transmedia franchise, and both need different approaches.

The last element of transmedia storytelling, one that is not a major part of this thesis but important to mention anyway, is the role of consumers in most contemporary case studies. Most of these case studies only mention consumers in a superficial way, and if they elaborate on their roles it is mostly about their roles as ‘prosumers’ – one of the most infamous Web 2.0 related buzzwords. Prosumers are consumers that have started to produce content themselves, such as user-generated content for video games, or written fan fiction on fan sites. An

3 Single media consumers who are focuses on the television series can watch the series through Amazon Prime now too; however, this streaming opportunity was not available yet when Scolari wrote his essay.

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example of this is Natalia Sokolova’s Co-opting Transmedia Consumers: User Content as

Entertainment or ‘Free Labour’? Here, Sokolova gives examples such as the Ukrainian video

game series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (2007-2010), that has several communities who are writing fan literature and an encyclopædia, producing mobile apps and are even producing audio books for other fans. But why do so few scholars write the consumers that are not producing, but actually consuming content through one medium or different media?

A lot of existing case studies involving transmedia as a concept tend to exclude the importance of the different consumers, and often those consumers are only looked at as the prosumers only some of them are. In my opinion, case studies about transmedia products are too often about disjointing the build-up of a transmedia storytelling universe – and only sometimes the role that prosumers play in this, let alone the role of consumers in general. However, it is not entirely strange that most scholars approach cross/inter/transmedia platforms this way. As I will show in the next sub-chapter, this has been the most

conventional kind of analysis for a long time. In this sub-chapter, I will look at the sudden emergence of transmedia storytelling as a concept. As it turns out, transmedia platforms have been with us for decades before the buzzword started to get noticed, even though transmedia scholars still do not call these older products forms of transmedia.

2.2 (Re-)Historicizing Transmedia Storytelling

Transmedia storytelling as an academic discipline with productive debates was almost absent before this century. Many people seem to think Henry Jenkins coined this buzzword for the first time in 2003, and many have been influenced by his countless essays, weblogs and books surrounding transmedia, but also related concepts such as participatory culture and

convergence culture. For a large part, being influenced by Jenkins is righteous: he is without a doubt the most important scholar in this field, and probably the most groundbreaking one as well. However, there is one tricky catch to all of this; since lots of transmedia academics base their definition of transmedia storytelling on his suggestions and findings, critically

addressing potential flaws of his definition(s) does not seem to happen at all. The goal of this sub-chapter (and partly this thesis) is to do so, and thus to suggest potential changes around contemporary transmedia debates and definitions. I will be doing this by historicizing transmedia storytelling: by looking further into (trans)media history than most scholars do, and thereafter making the concept broader and easier to approach.

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with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games”, she often speaks about ‘transmedia intertextuality’. According to her this marks “an ever-expanding supersystem of

entertainment” (1), “a commercial supersystem” (3), by which she means franchises that use transmedia storytelling to attract consumers towards many products, for instance of the

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise (3). As one can read between the lines, Kinder was

very careful with this new concept in a sense that she already pointed out the dangers; and rightly so, since transmedia (intertextuality) is indeed a commercial matter.

Because the term is just over two decades old and only in more general use for just over one decade, most transmedia scholars tend to have a peculiar criterion to decide if a potential transmedia franchise is actually transmedia. According to them, digital media are inherent to transmedia franchises. Most of these scholars do not argue it literally but their statements do imply so, such as Marina Hassapopoulou, who stated in Spoiling Heroes, Enhancing Our

View Pleasure: NBC’s Heroes and the Re-Shaping of the Televisual Landscape that

“transmedia storytelling [is] a prime example of how digital media are reshaping the realm of television.” (46) It is as if she claims that without digital media, transmedia storytelling would not exist. Dan Hassler-Forrest concludes the exact same thing in his recent Dutch book

Transmedia: Verhalen Vertellen in het Digitale Tijdperk, translated as Transmedia: Storytelling in the Digital Age.4_{The title of this book alone implies that transmedia}

(storytelling) and the digital age go hand in hand, and in his chapter A History of Transmedia he gives several examples of multimedia franchises before the digital age, and explains why he does not think this is transmedia at all.

One of his most outlined examples is the Sherlock Holmes franchise. At the end of the 19th

century, short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were released and soon after the first stage adaptation premiered. Lots of radio plays, television series, films, games later, Hassler-Forrest concludes that Sherlock Holmes is a cultural icon but not its franchise is not an example of transmedia: he calls it elementary intermediality instead (24-27). Sherlock Holmes is a fine example of a collection of stories that are constantly remediated, but the different stories are not coherent in telling one overarching story and thus not transmedia in its current

understanding. The Superman franchise suffers from the same problem and, according to Hassler-Forrest, is not a good example of transmedia either. There are too many exceptions that contradict the basic rules of the character: in one of the stories he grows up in the Soviet-Union instead of the United States of America, in other stories he suddenly loses his super

4 From now, in order to be clear for non-Dutch speakers, when referring to Dan Hassler-Forrest’s book I will only use the versions of the title his and sayings that are translated by myself.

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powers even though this contradicts earlier timelines (27-30).

The Twin Peaks franchise is Hassler-Forrest’s main example of the first ‘simple

transmedia’: as a television production that tried to build a storyworld that exists of more than one medium, such as a film, several books, a fictionalized city guide and fan magazine

Wrapped in Plastic (36-40). To illustrate the more complex form of transmedia

Hassler-Forrest uses The Matrix, just as many scholars (Jenkins 2007 and Weaver 2013 for instance) do. Existing of three films, eight animation shorts, two video games, comic books, and dozens of websites (40-47), The Matrix is definitely one of the most ambitious and complex

transmedia storytelling examples of our time. But that is also exactly the point that indicates why I do not agree with most transmedia scholars - of our time. I simply do not believe it is true that (complex) forms of transmedia are something of the last fifteen years and I even dare to say that I refuse to believe that transmedia did not exist before the nineties, even though most scholars imply this as a fact by only focusing on cases that were developed after the first mention of the word transmedia.

There are a few academics who (seem to) agree with me and actually did some case studies regarding transmedia storytelling projects that are much older. Michael Kackman for instance has no problem calling Hopalong Cassidy a form of transmediation and franchising (94) and considers it a transmedia global brand (95), even though its popularity peak goes back to the 1940s and 1950s (76). Originally, cowboy Hopalong Cassidy appeared in western novels about a century ago, while adaptations of the stories would not become popular – both in the United States of America and across the ocean – until the rise of television in the 1950s (76). And the adaptation through television was not all: 36 million comic books were sold every year and no less than 56 million readers were provided with the Hopalong Cassidy strip in 150 daily newspapers (81). Hopalong Cassidy would become one of the first great examples of transmedia exploitation through franchising.

In his dissertation about Transmedia Brand Licensing, Avi Santo analyzes different

popular culture brands from 1933 until 1966 and looks at their success through merchandising and different media products. Santo has no problem naming The Green Hornet as a brand that once had a transmediated career (446) and thus does not make a distinction between

transmedia nowadays, and the already existing concept of transmedia over half a century ago. Another example of ‘old’ transmedia, that comes from Jeffrey Long, even predates printing: the Bible. About the Bible, Long said:

One might argue that since a parishioner could first experience the story of Genesis through a rose window, then Exodus through a sermon, then Leviticus through hymns,

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and then Deuteronomy through paintings, the Bible has always been a transmedia franchise. (24)

Now, I can prudently conclude that the main reasons of these older transmedia franchises not being widely accepted as actual examples of transmedia storytelling are i) they have nothing to do with the digital age and ii) the popularity of these transmedia franchises were at their peak when the term transmedia did not even occur in literature yet. The reasoning behind both arguments intertwines, since the mainstreaming of the digital age and transmedia’s existence in terminology rose at the same time, starting at the early 1990s. Nevertheless, this does not mean we should consider every single form of multimedia projects dating from before the 1990s, as non-transmedia. The rise of the digital definitely marked a new age in transmedia storytelling and made the concept even more complex than it already was. Transmedia storytelling is evolving and the digital age definitely plays a part in this. But if a franchise is telling us a coherent story through films, novels, comic books, television and other

non-‘digital age’ media, why should this not be an example of transmedia franchising? Without the digital age as an element that matters, older examples given by Kackman, Santo and Long still meet Jenkins’ definition – the definition most used by transmedia scholars anyway.

However, there still are multimedia franchises that, at first sight, cannot be called

transmedia franchises, simply because they do not expand the existing story, and sometimes contradict it. Hassler-Forrest seems to make a rather convincing point here with bringing up

Sherlock Holmes and Superman as examples of these stories. Yet, even if certain franchises

do not live up to this 21st_{century definition, it might be best to think of this: academics should}

think of another way to describe this older form of transmedia storytelling, some sort of definition that applied at a time where being canonist did not matter for franchise’s individual products. This new definition could even be helpful to describe (transmedia) franchises today. To illustrate the need for a definition like this, let us go back to the Star Wars example in the introduction. Now that ninety percent of the published Star Wars media products is not canon anymore, should everyone suddenly stop calling Star Wars an example of transmedia, even though it has been one of the major examples all that time? Of course not! Star Wars as transmedia storytelling is just as relevant today as it was over the last ten to fifteen years. However, LucasArts’ decision to make all these products non-canonical helped expose how fragile the concept of transmedia storytelling is and how difficult it can still be to decide if a franchise is an example transmedia or not. Therefore, I propose a dichotomy to distinguish

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two types of transmedia: hard and soft transmedia.

The idea of a distinction between hard and soft transmedia comes from Jeffrey Long. Long uses this distinction for a reason that is slightly different than my reasoning. ‘Hard’ is a term he uses to describe transmedia narratives that are designed as transmedia from the beginning. ‘Soft’ transmedia narratives on the other hand, are “only created after some original media component proved successful.” Transmedia narratives that are both soft and hard are what Long calls ‘chewy’; he names The Matrix as an example, since their creators had (hard) transmedia plans from the beginning but were only allowed to develop their plans after the success of the first film – an approach that is soft. Immediately after introducing the hard-soft distinction, Long noted that perhaps another choice of words would be more suited: a priori (before the experience) instead of hard, versus a posteriori (after the experience) instead of soft (20-21).

I truly appreciate Long’s brave approach towards transmedia, since he shares the same ideas as I do about categorizing transmedia. Just as Long, I feel that a priori and a posteriori are more suitable terms do describe the distinction he makes, which is why I feel that the hard-soft opposition should be used for something else. I consider ‘hard’ transmedia

narratives as franchises that are complex – this could be because of their use of an enormous amount of different media, and/or because of their (successful) efforts to make their universe fully canonical. ‘Soft’ transmedia narratives on the other hands are less complex; either because they use less media to tell their stories – and thus do not struggle with the use of digital media – and/or because their efforts to be canonical are minimal or even non-existent. Either way, both types of narratives are examples of transmedia. Star Wars could thus be considered as a transmedia narrative that was once hard, but since it basically discharged most of the existing products as parts of the overarching narrative, it has become a soft transmedia narrative. Please note that the hard-soft distinction does not have anything to do with implicit personal preferences; I simply feel that this is the best possible, both practical and linguistic, opposition to distinguish these types of transmedia from each other.

In this chapter, I have introduced the basics surrounding transmedia storytelling, using definitions and focuses of several scholars that complement each other. I also historicized both transmedia storytelling and the academic branch that researches transmedia. Here, I concluded that the current focus on both the digital age and the canonistic stories stands in the way of understanding the many different forms transmedia franchises can take. Ultimately, I proposed a distinction between two types of transmedia: ‘soft’ and ‘hard’, that should help us better understand the big picture. In the next chapter, I will introduce my main case study:

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video game Disney Infinity. Throughout the rest of this thesis, I will show you that Disney

Infinity proves how complex yet incredibly interesting transmedia can be, and I will use it to

support my arguments and thus illustrate why the concept should be analyzed differently from the way most scholars tend to analyze it in contemporary literature.

3. INTRODUCING THE CASE OF DISNEY INFINITY

Over the years, many studies, essays and books (such as Schell 2008, Driscoll 2011, Pugh 2012, Wohlwend 2013) linked Disney to transmedia. Disney (officially: The Walt Disney Company) owns an enormous amount of popular culture brands, ranging from animation classics such as Mickey Mouse, Snow White and the recent Frozen, to brands developed by subsidiaries, such as Pixar (Toy Story, Cars), LucasArts (Star Wars) and Marvel

(Spider-Man, The Avengers, X-Men). Lots of these brands are impressive transmedia narratives,

generating billions and billions of dollars accumulated every single year. It goes without saying that Disney can be considered as one of the largest, longest existing and most

innovative transmedia companies in the world. Because of that, practically every case study of any Disney-owned IP – either broad and general or small but detailed – automatically is an interesting one. So just imagine how ambitious a product would be that brings all of these brands together.

This product exists. It is called Disney Infinity.

Disney Infinity is a video game that was released in August 2013. Players are able to roam

through worlds that are taken from or based on franchises owned by Disney, playing with protagonists and/or other important characters from for instance Monsters University (2013),

The Incredibles (2004) and thr Pirates of the Caribbean series. Playing in these worlds is one

of the main modes of Disney Infinity; each and every of these brands is called a Play Set. For instance, when playing through the Monsters University Play Set - which is a campaign5_{– you}

can achieve goals, play through missions, while playing as fan-favorite Sully. These missions

5 In video games, a campaign is typically a story mode in which the player has objectives to achieve in order to advance and play through the whole story. Most campaigns involve only one player, in others it is possible to play through a campaign with two or more players.

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involve references to the Monsters University film, the prequel to Monsters, Inc. (2001) that was released a couple of months before Disney Infinity’s launch. Using an example to illustrate this point: in the film, protagonists Sulley and Mike go to college at Monsters University. Here, they join a team to take part in the Scare Games. While the film focuses mostly on these Scare Games and the ways that Mike, Sulley and their friends prepare for them, the Play Set in Disney Infinity focuses on events in between these Scare Games, such as toilet papering trees of a university called Fear Tech – a university only briefly mentioned in the film – or sneaking up at Fear Tech students to scare them until they start screaming. Similar narrative relationships between the film’s story and the game’s story can be found at the other Play Sets of Disney Infinity as well. These two storylines will never contradict each other. Instead, they are designed to complement each other. Therefore, Disney Infinity’s storytelling can be defined as a part of the franchise’s hard transmedia storytelling, because of their successful efforts to make their universe fully canonical. This is also evident from the fact that a player cannot play through a Play Set of franchise X, while using a character from franchise Y. The extraordinary thing about Disney Infinity however, is that it enables several individual franchises to extend their hard transmedia storytelling practices by using the same product; that one game on its own. And I haven’t even started to describe the gameplay element that is essential to the (commercial) success of these transmedia franchises; their merchandising.

The way that Disney Infinity allows players to choose which character they want to play with, is based on merchandising as a starting point. To play, the consumer places one or two figurines on a portal – which is called the Infinity Base - that is connected with the games console. These figurines are subsequently ‘imported’ into the game, through a chip that is implemented in each of these figurines (see Fig. 1 for Disney Infinity’s basic setup). This chip is also used to save data such as certain developed strengths and weaknesses of your own character, so that the character that the player developed can also be used when playing

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Fig. 1: The basic setup of Disney Infinity

Disney Infinity’s starter pack comes with the game disc, an Infinity Base, three Play Sets

(imported in the game by putting different hexagonal shaped stones on the Infinity Base) of

Monsters University, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Incredibles and three different

figurines that embody protagonists of these three franchises (resp. Sulley, Jack Sparrow and Mr. Incredible). Play Sets based on the franchises of Cars, The Lone Ranger and Toy Story can be purchased individually (each of these includes two figurines), and the same is true for individual characters of the already owned Play Sets and characters from franchises that do not have a Play Set. The question that inevitably arises to the minds of the observant readers is the following one: why would you buy characters from franchises that do not have a Play Set, if you cannot use them in Play Sets of other franchises?

This has everything to do with another, perhaps equally important game mode in Disney

Infinity: its Toy Box mode. In this mode, players are able to build whatever they want, using

in-game tools and weapons, gadgets, items and much more that they unlocked in the game or bought in the stores. They can unlock chaos in their open-world arena by unleashing dozens of cartoonish enemies, or build a racing course to race opponents that are both human and artificial. The amount of possibilities is almost infinite. To infinity… and beyond!

While the Play Set mode is a perfect example of transmedia storytelling through a hard format, the Toy Box mode is an example of soft transmedia storytelling. Disney’s efforts to treat their franchises canonical is non-existent here, since this universe consists of characters

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ranging from franchises such as Frozen and Toy Story to Phineas and Ferb; stories taking place in different worlds and fictional era’s, and players are actually creating their own stories. Because of that, there is practically no guidance from Disney’s side to tell a story that makes sense from a canonical point of view. The punch line is that by allowing players to create their own universe, this universe cannot be a part of the hard transmedia universe that Disney is practiced in. However, by consciously choosing to use a soft transmedia strategy as well, Disney is pushing the success of Disney Infinity as a whole. This is something on which I will elaborate in chapter 4.

Although the success of Disney Infinity will be largely explained in the next chapters, I will lift the veil momentarily in order to already introduce some context around its success. First of all, Disney Infinity is a fine example of how different franchising strategies can come together and create a certain buzz around a product or franchise. All these strategies are meant to let possible consumers feel some kind of connection with the product for a long period of time, whether this is through classic examples of marketing, with the use of unique selling points, or via a regulated system of releases - also known as seriality. In chapter 4, I will elaborate on these claims using different theories and examples, including examples related to

Disney Infinity.

Its success was so impressive that a sequel is already in the making. Somewhere during fall 2014, Disney Infinity 2.0: Marvel Super Heroes (from now on referred to as Marvel Super

Heroes). In this sequel to Disney Infinity, Play Sets and characters all involve the many

superheroes, sidekicks and villains starring in different Marvel franchises, such as The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America, and so on. During my research for this thesis, I was able to attend a live webcast event of Marvel Super Heroes’ reveal, where different writers and producers of both Marvel comics and Disney Infinity studio Avalanche Software had their sayings. Some of the announced news suits chapter 4 much better, but an interesting conclusion for now comes from the structure of this webcast. The introduction and ending of the webcast for instance were done by Samuel L. Jackson; a recurring cast member of many Marvel films. The webcast in general was presented by Clark Gregg, one of the protagonists of television series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013-?). So here is a fine example of a synergy of television, film, comic books and games, and the coming together of a few of the important persons behind these different media products. How more suitable can a

presentation for a new transmedia product be?

Important here is that Disney did not invent this new ‘genre’ of video games. The first series of video games that include a portal on which figurines can be placed to ‘import’ them

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in the game, was the Skylanders franchise. Its first installment was released by publisher Activision in 2011, with sequels following in 2012 and 2013. In total, 175 million Skylanders figurines were sold since 2011, helping to make Skylanders one of the top 20 highest-selling video games series of all time (Dyer). One can imagine why Disney felt attracted to the idea of a strategy regarding the release of video games with additional figurines. It seems easy to argue that Disney ‘stole’ Activisions Skylanders strategy to create Disney Infinity, but this would be a much too simplistic conclusion, since there are several important differences between both franchises.

First of all, with Skylanders, Activision had no means of telling a transmedia story. Only a handful of the characters appeared in other video games before; the rest of the characters i.e. figurines were made up solely for the Skylanders franchise. This is a strong contrast to Disney

Infinity, where Disney only uses characters that already exist. Because of that, many of the

younger players may already feel bonded with Disney Infinity’s characters. This is a concept I would like to call transpopularity; more on this concept will follow in the next chapter. Secondly, the set-up of Skylanders’ and Disney Infinity’s campaigns are quite different from each other. While Disney Infinity enables the player to play through several, relatively minor campaign called Play Sets, and limits the amount of characters each Play Set can played through, Skylanders basically exists of one big campaign where players can exchange between characters, i.e. figurines, to their heart’s content. Because of Disney Infinity’s choice not to do so, players might be tempted to buy more figurines in the long run, only to play through every single Play Set that is being released. Finally, the last important difference between these two franchises is Disney Infinity’s Toy Box mode. It is exactly in this game mode where players are supposed to feel like they can build and do anything, with as few as possible limits.

In other words, Disney did not simply steal the idea of Disney Infinity from the Skylanders franchise; in fact, what Disney did is a perfect example of why historicizing transmedia is of great importance. Disney used an existing concept and has evolved it into something much more interesting in regard to transmedia; just as transmedia in general evolved and still evolves through time. Without taking the historical in perspective, the transmedia field will never be able to fully fathom the ongoing evolution of transmedia and its continuous changes of meaning.

In this chapter I have introduced Disney Infinity - my main case study - and explained why this is such a fine example of transmedia storytelling in general. I also hinted at the

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making Disney Infinity a popular and successful product. In the following chapter, I will explain the concept of franchising, how it is related to transmedia storytelling, and why these different franchising strategies are important for the producers responsible for transmedia storytelling. Among other examples, Disney Infinity will be extensively analyzed in order to see how various, still to be introduced strategies can be used in order to successfully launch a product in a transmedia universe.

4. FRANCHISING S AND ITS RELATION TO TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING

Throughout this essay, you might have noticed that when addressing a franchise’s audience, I do not only refer to them as viewers or players, but as consumers as well. Here, I refer to consumers as people who are consuming the texts in the sense that they are using it, as well as to (the same) people that are consuming i.e. purchasing these texts i.e. products. A similar approach to this comes from Scolari, who also talks about receivers of media products as (implicit) consumers (2009). In this chapter, I will mainly focus on explaining the different strategies that transmedia producers apply to reach as many consumers as possible. However, this does not mean that research from a consumer’s viewpoint cannot be productive and fruitful for the understanding of transmedia storytelling as a whole. Therefore, I will provide you with a modest, general understanding of the broad field of fandom and fan culture, which is especially interesting since the importance of fan participation is relevant from a producer’s point of view as well.

In Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, originally published in 19926_{, Henry Jenkins explored the world of television fans and how they understand the role}

6 Some contextualization: this is before the buzzword transmedia arrived in academic literature in large numbers.

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they play in the entertainment form they so much adore. The whole book is a description and evaluation of this specific subculture, which he defines as

a social group struggling to define its own culture and to construct its own community within the context of what many observers have described as a postmodern era; it documents a group insistent on making meaning from materials others have characterized as trivial and worthless (3)

When evaluating this more than twenty years old definition, it is possible to update it. The digital age has allowed all kinds of fans, including television fans and fans of specific

transmedia franchises for that matter, to construct their own community and to communicate fast and distinctly about all subjects involving the product and/or franchise these consumers are fans of.

A nice collection of analyses involving fan culture can be found in “Fan Cultures” by Matt Hills, published in 2003. Not only is this book an recommended read for anyone who wants to read a detail introduction on fan culture and fandom, it is also interesting because this is one of the first extensive fan studies that takes the digitalization of fandom into account. Hills was one of the first to write a ‘mainstream’ approach about the ways fans use the Internet, and about the effects this has on fans’ participation when creating a universe around a certain product, or: around a franchise.

To see how case studies involving transmedia products often provide us with a fan’s or consumer’s point of view, is more obvious than one might think. Both transmedia storytelling and fan cultures are concepts that were acknowledged in mainstream academic literature around the same time. Since transmedia storytelling does indeed have to do with the reception of the transmedia products and franchises, connecting these two is the most logical thing to do when analyzing a specific case study. However, since the role of prosumers has been

described actively for many years now, it is especially interesting to approach the subject of transmedia from an opposite angle: that of the producers creating a successful franchise. But when talking about franchising in transmedia, what is it scholars should be talking about? What is a franchise?

Over the years, much has been written about franchises and franchising in general, and when looking at an older definition it tells us that a franchise “is a right, privilege, or power, of public concern, which cannot be exercised by private individuals at their will, but must be secured by grant, in some form, from the sovereign power of the territory in which it is to be exercised” (Needham 98). This definition, originally published by Columbia Law Review in 1915, is a fine starting point towards creating a definition for the type of franchising that I am

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currently research; transmedia franchising. In fact, when decomposing this definition into smaller bits, it seems that this definition is already a useful one. Franchising in transmedia is indeed a privilege, in a sense that only companies with enough manpower and knowledge are able to create a decent franchise. It is of public concern in a way that it has to be done

properly in order for consumers to receive the products that they want. That same group of consumers is the sovereign power of the abstract territory that has to grant power in order to let a company exercise transmedia franchising: without the support of this so-called sovereign power, a franchise is doomed to fail. As with all products that are produced for commercial reasons, a product is unnecessary when there is no one who uses it.

This commercial aspect is underlined by Jonathan Solish, who claims that a franchise exists of three elements: a licensed mark, payment of a franchise fee, and a marketing plan (3). It is especially this last element, a marketing plan, that plays a big role in analyzing transmedia franchising. In my opinion, a simplified explanation of transmedia’s franchising, of transmedia franchising’s marketing plan, is that transmedia franchising is a marketing plan.

4.1 Transmedia Franchising Strategies

In the following subchapters, I will introduce several forms of transmedia franchising. Some of them are differentiated, while others are more intertwined. Each of the franchising forms shall be illustrated with at least one example; in the end, a case study regarding Disney

Infinity will prove how all of these franchising strategies can be united in order to successfully

build a transmedia product that is of value to a franchise. Most of these individual strategies can also be considered a form of branding: however, I prefer the term ‘franchising’ because of the necessity for producers to create a franchise that is successful; by branding one product, the goal is to brand as much as possible of the franchise as a whole.

Important to take into account is this: although producers definitely want to share content with their consumers that can be proud of, transmedia storytelling in the entertainment industry is always meant to be especially profitable. All these different franchising strategies thus have one goal: making money. Yes, this sounds harsh, but this is the reality since these companies are no non-profit organizations and have an enormous amount of staff who all want to earn a good living. Making these profits is achieved by creating a sense of

consciousness, or better: awareness with consumers that these products exist, and to pull as many consumers towards your franchise, let them feel connected to it and making sure they

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will not leave your franchise behind.

4.1.1 Marketing in its Known Forms

Traditional marketing has been around for ages. It can be the yelling of a merchant using gushy oneliners to seduce you into buying his products, or events where producers show their products towards press and the public. More relevant for transmedia producers is the use of traditional marketing through media; trailers in cinemas and on television, pop-up advertising on websites, posters in bus shelters, advertising in magazines; it involves everything to make sure that the product becomes visible to a wide audience. Close to traditional marketing stands viral marketing; once a gimmick, nowadays almost as traditional as the marketing strategies above.

Viral marketing examples are often small, fictional stories that support the story of the transmedia product or franchise being marketed. They can for instance be web pages, online (flash) games, or small video’s; as long as it is a form of electronic content that gets shared between Internet users, using a specific URL (Watts and Peretti, qtd in Ho and Dempsey, 1000). The goal behind viral marketing is to excite potential consumers into becoming ‘real’ consumers, not only by consuming the URL which is shared with them, but through

consuming one or several products the viral is referring to as well. The more attention a marketing strategy such as this gets, the more viral it is. A fine example would be the fictional TED Talk taking place in 2023; it appeared on YouTube and other social media networks, exploded in popularity but was actually a way to promote the upcoming film Prometheus (2012), which is a film that has ties with films from the Alien franchise – a franchise that consists of games, comics and other media as well. This specific example of a viral marketing product is also an example of a creative addition towards the transmedia storytelling process in general, since it adds an extra storyline to the Prometheus (and Alien) universe.

Although viral marketing has to be a form of electronic content shared through a URL– at least according to its widely acknowledged definition – it can be combined with traditional marketing as well. For example, a viral marketing stunt of HBO’s television series True

Blood – a transmedia franchise that also contains books and webisodes - involved a billboard

advertising Tru Blood; a drink meant for vampires in the True Blood universe, which serves as an alternative for real, human blood (see Figure 2). In a sense, this makes both traditional and viral marketing the most well-known forms of marketing in general.

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Fig. 2: A billboard serving as a fictional advertisement for a drink called Tru Blood, meant as a promotional for the television series True Blood.

4.1.2 Creating Transpopularity

Transpopularity is a term that I introduce to describe the rising popularity of product X, because of the successful release of product Y. In a transmedia franchise, transpopularity means that the popularity of a new product helps to make other products in the franchise become popular as well, even if they have been released months or even years earlier than this newest addition to the franchise. Transpopularity can be applied to all sorts of franchises, not only to transmedia related ones. For instance, when a singer suddenly becomes popular after releasing, let us say, his fifth album, earlier albums will see increasing sales numbers as well. My idea of transpopularity comes from Micha Kavka’s understanding of ‘effects of intimacy’. Writing about reality TV in Industry Convergence Shows: Reality TV and the

Leisure Franchise, Kavka claims that certain reality television shows have a positive effect on

the popularity of associated products. All of this, according to Kavka comes from a loyalty towards the (television) program, coming from the many viewers of that television show. This paradigm can be extended towards transmedia as well. Kavka also states that serializing is partly responsible for this development – more on that will follow in the next sub-chapter (86-87).

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A well-known example to describe this paradigm is the Pokémon franchise. Originally released as a video game, this game became much more popular after the release of the animation series. Pokémon turned out to become one of the biggest franchises of the late nineties. However, it is difficult to prove a correlation between the popularity of these two products. Therefore I would like to introduce a similar example, which is much more recent: the Japanese Yokai Watch franchise. The video game was its first installment and was released on July 11, 2013. After releasing a popular animation series of the franchise in January 2014, sales numbers of the video game moved upwards again. For the week between April 28 to May 5 in 2014, Yokai Watch was suddenly at the top of the Japanese sales charts and was running the risk of selling out all the copies there still were available in stores (Ashcraft). Ironically, the Yokai Watch game is considered to be a potential successor to Pokémon games because of its contents (Nakamura). This makes the comparison of these two franchises even more interesting, since the same transpopularity strategy used fifteen years ago for Pokémon, still seems to work for Yokai Watch, present day.

4.1.3 Seriality

Seriality is a concept that has close ties with the explained transpopularity strategy. Seriality is being used in television studies for all kinds of reasons and can, in general, best be described as dividing a broad narrative over several episodes that promise a conclusion (Creeber, 10). Seriality as a type of storytelling evolved from the original episodic storytelling, where each episode of a television series has its own story to tell. Over the last decades, this same reconceptualization of storytelling has also occurred in media such as video game and the Internet (Mittell, 39). Although the notion of seriality is mostly known for its use in television studies, it is a concept that matters when analyzing other media platforms as well.

After all, seriality does not find its origins in television; it has been a part of media in general far before television even existed. Think for instance of rise of the first weekly and daily newspapers in the 19th_{century, a medium that still provides readers with the latest news,}

spread out over a long period of time with continuous releases. Although this type of storytelling has parallels with episodic storytelling – for a large part, every edition of newspaper tells its own stories when compared to earlier and later editions – elements of seriality can be found through, for instance, short comics that tell stories which progress

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throughout a longer period of time. The earlier mentioned Hopalong Cassidy is an example of that, but seriality in the 19th_{century and early 20}th_{century was not only restricted to}

distribution through newspapers. There are many examples of novels and radio plays that use seriality as a franchising strategy as well. Clearly, seriality has been around for quite some time.

Since seriality proved its success by constantly recurring - we see this strategy pop up in all kinds of media and in different eras – seriality is here to stay. Because it has proven to be such a fortunate strategy, its continuous return in new media can be looked at as a form of remediation. Thus, these kinds of cultural logics that already apply to media such as

television, might also apply for other, newer media. Nevertheless, although seriality still is of great importance to the media industry, the contemporary form of the concept in transmedia does differ from the earlier forms, and thus the cultural logics reshaped as well. While seriality in a television series is one straight horizontal line throughout time, seriality in transmedia is more complex and therefore more spread out. When compared with television, seriality in transmedia can therefore best be visualized as a horizontal line that is its core, but one that contains ramifications that are vertical, diagonal or even curved. Seriality might be more important than ever for (trans)media producers, but has also become more complex to explicate.

A viewpoint that – perhaps unintentional - helps understanding seriality in transmedia comes from Umberto Eco. In The Limits of Interpretation, Eco goes as far to say that he recommends readers to take ““seriality” as a very wide category or, if one wishes, as another term for repetitive art” (84). What he means with this specific quote, especially when calling seriality another term for repetitive art, is that seriality unables a narrative to come to a conclusion. Following Eco’s logics in terms of transmedia, seriality means that a transmedia franchise keeps repeating certain patterns because the producer does not want it to end until there is no more leeway. Therefore, the franchise simply is too lucrative. It is undisputed that the shift from episodic storytelling towards serial storytelling means that the series as a whole – the franchise as a whole – is most important.

Seriality is inherent to a transmedia franchise: without seriality there simply would not be a transmedia franchise. There are different strategies for producers to distribute their different ‘episodes’ of a franchise. In my opinion, the most interesting examples of seriality in a transmedia franchise are the examples that show us how well distributed over time the releases of their episodes are. It is especially clever when a franchise distributes its products well divided throughout the fictional storyline as well, considering the time they take place

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narratively. In “Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production”, Carlos Alberto Scolari shows us how well

24’s producers did a job (see Figure 3). Keep in mind that these different products were

distributed in a timespan that lasts many years. This adds an extra dimension to the whole concept of seriality.

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Fig. 3: Seriality in 24 as displayed by Scolari (596)

Although the figure above does not demonstrate the release date of each product, 24’s

enormous amount of products does illustrate how important it is for a transmedia franchise to release as much content as possible, through as much media as possible. Later on this chapter I will demonstrate another example of seriality - including release dates that demonstrate its importance.

In my introduction, I already claimed that the decision by Disney and LucasArts to remove most of the official Star Wars stories from the franchise’s canon was a smart one. I believe that this has everything to do with the power of seriality. Over the last decades, dozens of stories concerning the Star Wars universe have been released through different media. The amount of (canonical) freedom for writers of upcoming stories in the franchise would have been far less if these already existing stories would still be part of the canon. Since seriality is

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one of the reasons that Star Wars has always been immensely popular, even during the years that no new films were released, the people responsible for seriality in Star Wars can now start a new transmedia franchise. With almost no limitations and thirty years of gaining knowledge about seriality’s important for a transmedia franchise, LucasArts and Disney now have all the space and possibilities they need to create an even more successful transmedia franchise.

4.1.4 Merchandising

The importance of merchandising in business has been acknowledged for quite some time now. In 1918, John B. Swinney wrote “Merchandising”, a book that needed to be written because Swinney found it “necessary to make a special investigation of the field” (v). Swinney could not have been more ahead of his time: it is impossible to imagine a world where Harry Potter sweaters, Jurassic Park backpacks, FC Barcelona lunchboxes and other merchandising do not exist. Merchandise is a key element of many transmedia franchises because i) it generates extra profits, ii) it creates a stronger bond between the consumer and the franchise and iii) because of that bond, consumers will be more likely to consume other products from that same franchise.

This does not necessarily mean that merchandise has to be individually sold in order to become a successful tool for franchising. Either giving away toys for each sold Happy Meal at McDonalds based on characters of the latest animation film, or offering a poster of a video game when buying a certain magazine: as long as it has a physical appearance of which you can derive the brand, it is a fully fledged example of merchandising. Because then, as a producer you succeeded in creating awareness involving both your product and franchise.

4.1.5 User-generated Content

While the idea of user-generated content often is a central point of discussion in analyses of fan culture, the concept is of great importance from a franchising point of view as well. User-generated content in relation to a transmedia franchise includes everything that is produced by a user i.e. consumer, and helps expanding the franchise’s universe or helps franchising in general. One can think of (unofficial) fan fiction that tell us background stories, designed levels for a game and art work, but participating through social media channels that are designated to a franchise or a part of it, is a type of user generated content as well.

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User generated content has been discussed from different viewpoints, but one of the most notable examples must be Terranova’s “Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.”

According to Terranova, producing any form of culture through the web is a form of what she calls ‘free labor’; “a desire of labor immanent to late capitalism, and late capitalism is the field is the field that both sustains free labor and exhausts it” (51). Between the lines we can read that free labor, i.e. user-generated content, goes hand-in-hand with (late) capitalism, and thus with a system that allows private owners – franchise producers – to make profits.

Terranova claims that the digital economy of the Internet cannot be separated from the overarching economy of late capitalism. Stimulating consumers to produce user-generated content therefore is an important strategy within the core of franchising.

One mainstream and therefore quite striking example of how user-generated content can become an important part of our culture is the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise. Although some might flinch when I call Fifty Shades a form of transmedia storytelling – or any form of storytelling for that matter – it is, following my earlier introduced redefinition, a really soft type of transmedia storytelling. Originally, Fifty Shades of Grey was a piece of Twilight fan fiction, written because author E.L. James was inspired by Twilight author Stephanie Meyer.. After complaints of readers about its contents, author E.L. James decided to remove the fan fiction, change the setting and its characters, and publish the stories through her own website and later as books (Boog). It is a convincing example of the importance of user-generated content, since the Twilight franchise benefited from the buzz around Fifty Shades, and the

Fifty Shades franchise is based entirely on this piece of user-generated content.

4.2 Disney’s Infinite Amount of Franchising Strategies

Before explaining how Disney Infinity has worked itself towards both an important

franchising product and even a franchise itself, I would like to underline that the franchising strategies that were used to get to that point, are not infinite in a literal sense. Nevertheless, I cannot imagine another case where all these different strategies were used so fluidly and seemingly are all in favor of creating one product that is both creative and profitable. Although Disney Infinity’s release has been almost a year ago when writing this thesis, it still makes use of classic forms of marketing strategies. For instance, when playing a flash game on someone else’s laptop recently, I got a pre-roll advertisement before starting to play promoting Disney Infinity. When watching television the other day, I even saw a commercial of it – nine months after its release. Video games that ‘aggressively’ advertise this long after

To Infinity and Beyond! Franchising in Transmedia Storytelling

To Infinity and Beyond!

Franchising in Transmedia Storytelling

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