Week 11 Seminar: Franchise Fatigue

The point where a continuity asks for more attention than its audience has, and how much canon a year a franchise can sustain.

19 May 2027

The technique#

Every continuity has a rate: how much new canon it asks its audience to keep up with each year. Franchise fatigue is what happens past that rate. Viewers stop keeping the record, and a story that depends on the record stops working for them.

The case: The Marvels#

The Marvels (2023) needed its audience to have watched two Disney+ series, WandaVision and Ms. Marvel, to know two of its three leads. It became the lowest-grossing film in the MCU. Disney then said it would release fewer Marvel films and series each year.

In the seminar#

We lay the slate you bring on one timeline and find where the rate broke. Was it the number of releases, or how much each one depended on the others? Briefings run as usual. Then Capstone bibles are swapped for the stranger test: you leave with someone else’s universe and a week to write an episode into it.