As Hollywood shifts towards the digital era, the role of the media franchise has become more prominent. This edited collection, from a range of international scholars, argues that the franchise is now an integral element of American media culture. As such, the collection explores the production, distribution and marketing of franchises as a historical form of media-making – analysing the complex industrial practice of managing franchises across interconnected online platforms.
Examining how traditional media incumbents like studios and networks have responded to the rise of new entrants from the technology sector (such as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google), the authors take a critical look at the way new and old industrial logics collide in an increasingly fragmented and consolidated mediascape.
James Fleury teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. His work has appeared in Mediascape: UCLA’s Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (2012, 2015), James Bond and Popular Culture: Essays on the Influence of the Fictional Superspy (McFarland, 2014), the South Atlantic Review (2015), and Content Wars: Tech Empires vs. Media Empires (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming). His dissertation analyzes the history of video games at Warner Bros.
Bryan Hikari Hartzheim is Assistant Professor in the School of International Liberal Studies at Waseda University, where he teaches courses on digital media, games, and animation, with a focus on the Japanese media industries. His work has appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture, Mediascape, and the edited anthology Video Games in East Asia (Palgrave, 2017). He is currently working on a book on the game design of Hideo Kojima.
Stephen Mamber is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UCLA. He is a former film critic for Pacifica Radio, and was a founding member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. He was a Research Fellow at the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies, and has been an IBM Consulting Scholar and Research Scientist. He has had a special interest in digital media as it relates to film studies, and in recent years has created a number of iPad apps, both tools for media study and examinations of great films.
