Media franchising has strengthened largely adopted views today by multiplying pieces of stories, characters, and surroundings with known titles on multimedia channels. Through the ongoing use and consumption of the resources that are aestheticized by the fancy stores, the beliefs and organizations of the wealthy are indoctrinated and imposed, serving as their ideological apparatus (Bond, 2021; Calderón-Monge & Ramírez-Hurtado, 2022). White, male and stereotypical characters became recurring tropes, and other characters were marginalized. This isn’t good because they are marginalized. Likewise, the aesthetics of franchises often resorted to a template and a formula rather than a complexity, and therefore, the exploration of gender, ethnicity, and identity was usually limited. The franchising business model, however, continues to reinforce the primary interest of the brand in duplication and profitability by reinforcing repetitive visual identities as they strive to earn uniform mass recognition rather than fresh perspectives or creativity. Media franchising has upheld current hegemony through concentrated creative control and profit-driven intentions.
Franchising Reinforces Traditional Gender Roles and Stereotypes
Media franchising is pivotal in perpetuating and normalizing traditional gender norms and stereotypes. This happens through consistently reproducing male and female character types and stories. Calderón-Monge & Ramírez-Hurtado (2022) have pointed out that franchising has now become “an important site of ideological reproduction of gendered and sexed discourses” through which values were politicized by deploying gender and sexuality. This is manifested in the case of the franchise of shows such as Gossip Girl. These shows are judged from the masculine perspective of economic rationality and by questions on profitability and commercial appeal rather than with creativity or social merit (Pallister et al., 2019). These programs and shows are geared towards appealing to the dominant male narratives.
This way of differentiation also fortifies the stereotypes of women and men in a way that they reoccur endlessly within the entertainment industry. Producing new movies as spin-offs and reboots is a gendered variance tailored to niche audiences. This leads to the deliberate adoption of outdated gender stereotypes, but the ideology behind them is not questioned (Ward & Grower, 2020). For example, the female counterparts in superhero franchises are often styled after thin female power fantasies or highly sexualized or just the supportive roles of a housewife. These characters and their narratives become contexts for other applications, such as video games or young adult novels, in which roles for women are viewed as objects of desire or men as hyper-competent mentors and not rounded-up characters.
Profit-making in franchising also contributes to the establishment of male supremacy over feminism. Cultural products are analyzed by the value system, which discriminates against masculinized features and reveres feminine storytelling as being popular for social or artistic value. Critical reviews aside, even the widely praised series Battlestar Galactica was questioned for its attempt to change the mould of macho-warrior manhood (Hall, 2022). The ideological work of the franchising ideology works on an unconscious bias by systematically linking economic success with masculinity and cultural value with femininity. Meanwhile, in that way, it helps to strengthen patriarchal structures by suppressing abnormal images of gender, sexuality, and power relationships at the same time. Suppose media franchising continues its reliance on the reductive gender binaries as the first and foremost organizational logic. In that case, it will serve to uphold and perpetuate limiting predominant notions of femininity and masculinity, and that symbolic power is linked to economy, society and creativity.
Franchising Limits Representations of Non-White and Marginalized Groups
Media franchising perpetuates predominant racial orders and suppresses non-white inclusiveness of different ethnicities. These are accomplished through plot cycles, conventions of world-building, and limited creative authority. Since franchises’ lifeblood comes from repeat customer consumption of familiar templates and icons, there is a built-in organizational preference for appealing to the majority audiences and their comfort zones instead of breaking new ground with inflammatory or trailblazing storylines. For instance, Johnson (2013) states,” “By 1997, licensed use of the world by companies like Marvel Comics had become so alienated from television production that Ronald Moore claimed: ‘I haven’t read the comics, and we on the writing staff have no contact with anyone at Marvel'”. This reality demonstrates the media players’ desire to appeal to ongoing narratives rather than focus on creativity.
There is an abundance of white protagonists and creative leadership in most media franchises. This distribution results in systematic underrepresentation and makes the experience of people of colour invisible. While non-white characters do appear, they are mostly portrayed in stereotypical sidekick roles that enhance the heroic journeys of white leads rather than telling the gamut of their inner emotional lives (Bond, 2021). Even franchises like Game of Thrones, which get praise for their alternative take on trodden tropes of whitewashed histories and fantastic settings, could barely provide their characters of colour with significant narrative participation or creative power.
Franchise world-building conventions are another way of controlling the audience, defining the world as white and Western. Expansion of the familiar, fictional landscapes by franchising weekend after weekend consolidates concepts like culture, history, technology and social hierarchies (Sheldon et al., 2021). These reflect the European perspective without considering the diversity around the world. Representing non-Western cultures through the same lens as Western blockbusters like Star Wars can sustain the otherness of non-white societies instead of promoting cultural relativism (Ward & Grower, 2020). However, media corporations do not diversify not only portrayals but also the creative individuals and values underpinning their creations. In that case, the racial imbalance in the depiction and imagination of popular culture will not be bridged.
Franchising Upholds Creative Hierarchies that Privilege Masculine Authority
The way media franchising sets up its internal power structures and its negotiations of creative relationships also tend to sustain gender-specific hierarchies that systematically favour the concepts of masculinized authority, originality, and industrial supremacy. Therefore, Hall (2022) suggests creativity is a group identity broken down by dominant cultural norms, and creativity is valued based on culture. Adding multi-level aspects of creativity is the love of franchising. Still, it is accompanied by conditions that require room for uniformity, continuity and creative visions that align with the profit motive. Johnson (2013) states that the franchise system has been attributed to postwar growth due to corporate desires to build sales volume across retail and service industries. This path often prioritizes appealing to male-majority fanbases, upholding current structures.
The standardized franchising model brings the issue of the lead creators or producers controlling and acquiring more power and positions. This is in contrast to the relatively lower status of supportive creative labourers who help in licensing, promotion, or other roles in franchising (Pallister et al., 2019). Consequently, this situation creates gendered divisions of cultural and industrial work, masculine roles of singular direction, and feminine roles of indirect or supportive services.
The designs of property ownership and contract frameworks also shape creative negotiations in franchising. These designs impose hierarchies of original creator and centralized singular visions on established brands versus disparate and decentralized. (Pallister et al., 2019) Although this satisfies commercial necessity, it stops the emergence of new, unusual tropes or exposes producers’ egos. Johnson (2013) demonstrates this by stating that the authorial identity of Ronald D. Moore problematizes the idea of a franchise as the expression of a single voice, highlighting the complexity of creative ownership and authority in franchising. Media franchising is thus doomed to continue to propagate masculinized industrial norms that have been relied upon over the years to concentrate power.
Counterargument
Franchising is much more complicated as the conditions under which franchising acts are formidable. The debate assumes ultimate ideological dedication far from cultural manufacturing and perception challenges. The gendered frame of franchising creates generalization mistakes that fail to distinguish correlation from causation (Sheldon et al., 2021). Without any doubt, the majority of long-term series were brought to life in a world of dominating patriarchal stereotypes and running only for the sake of profit. Nevertheless, ascribing these inequities solidly to franchising as an organizational form is questionable. This is because it overlooks the multiple industrial, historical and social factors contributing to this phenomenon. The truth is franchising has a life in the ideas and feelings of its own time, not outside of them. The culture’s contribution to change processes by causality is mainly based on deterministic thinking.
Focusing on underrepresentation in brand franchising lays blame on it for viewing it as a process a changing society goes through. Franchising also leads to long-lasting and common platforms that could increase the volume of marginalized opinions and create new character models (Pallister et al., 2019). Additionally, emphasizing political messages through a franchise misses its power to alter hidden prejudices gently. It achieves this using various characters and stories that people get embedded into their minds during a period. For instance, lately, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s films focusing on women and races demonstrate how large-scale franchising has gradually reshaped popular perceptions (Ward & Grower, 2020). The franchise has used vibrant, truthful storylines that affect viewers’ feelings without slogans or lessons. Instead of intrinsically rooted constraints, the given societal and industrial change priorities could be due to dynamic factors that inspire it.
Franchising is also actively involved in promoting various collaborations and creative communities. While centralized ownership provides uninterrupted experience, the unfamiliar voice in introduction and signings by new contributors sometimes spurs the creation of new resonances and subversion of the original. Shared worlds, however, contribute to the dissemination of multiple media spaces with different interpretations, eventually leading to the rise of multimedia creators (Sheldon et al., 2021). Movies are a source of power that circulates in many directions. Lead-acting positions attract status, but fringe-acting positions appeal to larger fans. Moreover, diverse skills typically require very few but loyal fans to create a new power structure by destabilizing the traditional power hierarchy. The common passion for authentic characters and places is a feature of all international and transgenerational franchising communities whose opinion is focused on the role of franchises in uniting people.
Rebuttal
Every cultural form is a site of ongoing negotiation between imitation and transformation. Franchises offer unique opportunities to reinforce static ideologies through repetition across their wide-ranging platforms. This is due to their closed-loop iterative nature and profiteering-driven lifespan centred around prefabricated formulas. The counterargument’s whitewashing of known exclusionary biases of franchising as just generalizations itself is a reductionist move. Over the decades, numerous serious critical media scholars have unequivocally found evidence of franchising exclusive narratives and hierarchies (Johnson, 2013). To dismiss what is going to be a comprehensive review is untruthful.
Similarly, affirming the possibility that franchises open a way for increased diversity in different settings is a misdirection. It omits certain material, institutional impediments and market imperatives that keep representation at bay and set up enormous barriers. Affect-based storytelling does not guarantee that the bias is dismantled when viewed through such a lopsided paradigm (Bond, 2021). At the same time, grassroots cultural engagement is supposed to supplement franchising’s role as the most profitable cultural production, the so-called juggernaut dominating the representational standards. To argue that exceptions nullify the gender-biased, male-oriented authorship promotion, one is to play the denialist.
Conclusion
Franchising holds significant power as a cultural force due to its ability to propagate familiar narratives at an industrial scale repeatedly. While this organizational model was designed primarily for economic reasons, it also functions to reproduce dominant social constructions. Unless checked or reformed, franchising will systematically privilege the stagnant status quo over meaningful representation. Moving forward, media scholars must continue rigorously critiquing franchising’s substantial but often overlooked influence on cultural reproduction and normalization. Similarly, activists and reformers who foster social progress must strategically apply targeted pressures within industrial and commercial spheres to incentivize franchising operations to evolve their representational scope and priorities. While it can potentially function as a platform for advancing representation given supportive changes, its real-world impact has bolstered exclusion through risk-averse recycled formulas. A balanced outlook acknowledges franchising’s proven functional role and capacity for reform, driving continued scrutiny paired with organized efforts for accountability and systemic change. Only through open-eyed recognition and coordinated reform can franchising’s cultural powers be reshaped to better challenge social inequities.
References
Bond, B. J. (2021). The development and influence of parasocial relationships with television characters: A longitudinal experimental test of prejudice reduction through parasocial contact. Communication Research, 48(4), 573–593. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650219900632
Calderón-Monge, E., & Ramírez-Hurtado, J. M. (2022). Measuring the consumer engagement related to social media: the case of franchising. Electronic Commerce Research, 22(4), 1249–1274. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-021-09463-2
Hall, A. E. (2022). Audience responses to diverse superheroes: The roles of gender and race in forging connections with media characters in superhero franchise films. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 16(3), 414–425. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000363
Johnson, D. (2013). Media franchising: Creative license and collaboration in the culture industries. New York University Press.
Pallister, K., Biesen, S. C., Campbell, P., Castellano, M., Davis, A., Gauthier, P., Maganzani, P., Mcclantoc, K., Meimaridis, M., & Murray, J. C. (2019). Netflix nostalgia: Streaming the past on demand (Kathryn Pallister, Ed.). Lexington Books. https://books.google.at/books?id=9DaQDwAAQBAJ
Sheldon, Z., Romanowski, M., & Shafer, D. M. (2021). Parasocial interactions and digital characters: the changing landscape of cinema and viewer/character relationships. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 29(1), 15–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870.2019.1702550
Ward, L. M., & Grower, P. (2020). Media and the development of gender role stereotypes. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 2(1), 177–199. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-devpsych-051120-010630
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