Is Film Becoming Too Reliant on Franchises?

NOTE: The following is an abridged version of multiple reports that I and three other Brandeis students worked on for our Information Visualization class. Thank you to each of Elinam Ladzekbo, Yuming Ruan, and Akanksha Majumder for allowing me to share our work.

Context

From January 2025 to March 2025, me and three other Brandeis students role-played as entertainment analytics consultants for a class about data visualizations. Each of us are passionate about movies, and as a result of our shared interests, we decided to create a mock consultancy that helped studios and film investors green-light films. In the following post, we assess the complex relationship between intellectual property, film budgets, and worldwide revenue, and more or less come to the conclusion that the current movie industry is over-run by slop. Newsflash: we’re not fans.

At the end of this piece is an appendix of our previous reports for class, as well as our database. Although I wrote this specific blog post, most of the writing credit for our prior reports has gone to my teammates. For what it’s worth, my chief task was related to driving insights and working on the data side. If you happen to have issues with how those reports were written, blame business school – or, better yet, my teammates. Unless you want to blame me instead, in which case, no. You’re not allowed to do that. Everything I say as a first-semester masters student must be taken as Gospel. All hail me.

Methodology

Our group used revenue information from Box Office Mojo and other information (such as budget and genre information) from The Movie Database to create a large spreadsheet of the Top 50 films from 1998 to 2024. In rough order, here’s what we examined.

• Film Title – the name of a film.
• Year of Release – the year in which it came out.
• Worldwide Revenue – its total revenue at the box office.
• Existing Franchise or Source? – to represent if a film came from an established intellectual property at its release. 
• Budget – to represent the production and post-production costs.
• ROI Efficiency Score – a film’s total worldwide revenue divided by its estimated budget. 
• Success or Flop? – whether or not a film made more than 2.5 times its budget: a common practice for determining if a film succeeded or flopped 

NOTE: Only 70 films out of 1350 had missing or unverified information within our data set.

Figures 1a & 1b: How Much Do The Top 50 Films Earn & Cost?

In Figures 1a and 1b, we analyze the average worldwide budgets and average revenues of films within our database, segmenting them into three-year spans. We found an increasing amount of prevalence for franchise films over time particularly since the 2010s, coinciding with the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

While worldwide revenue technically continues to still exceed budgets, it is concerning for the film industry that as budgets have continued to increase in the post-pandemic climate, we’ve yet yet to see a similar return pre-COVID standards for worldwide revenue. Keep in mind that the actual budgets of films within the Top 50 vary wildly in our dataset, but that we chose ‘average’ as a metric for the purpose of effectively communicating key changes.

Figures 2a and 2b: ROI Efficiency Score Across Franchises & Originals (With and Without Outliers)

In Figures 2a and 2b, we analyzed the ROI Efficiency of franchise and non-franchise films using a box plot method, with and without outliers. This visualization highlights a stark contrast in financial risks between the two categories. While franchise films generally command higher budgets and can yield massive returns, they also demonstrate a much greater tendency to lose money. Unlike non-franchise films, their revenue distribution skews heavily toward under-performance, with many instances of breaking even or outright financial losses.

Some of the biggest failures in recent years reinforce this trend. The Marvels (-$167 million net revenue, 0.55 ROI Efficiency Score) and Disney’s 2020 Mulan remake (-$130 million net revenue, 0.35 ROI Efficiency Score) stand out as particularly disastrous. In contrast, the lowest-performing non-franchise films exhibit relatively smaller losses, with 2024’s Red One (-$64 million, 0,74 ROI Efficiency Score) and 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon (-$56 million, 0.74 ROI Efficiency Score) standing out.

Funnily enough, when accounting for outliers, the median ROI Efficiency Score is higher for non-franchise films (4.05) than it is for franchise films (3.24). With that said, the two categories are close enough in range to where any difference lacks definitive grounding. At the same time though, this visualization at least highlights a compelling counterpoint to the idea that franchise reliance is a safe bet. If anything, the franchises that deliver the highest reward are often the exception and not the rule. 

These findings suggest that while franchises offer a perception of financial security, they do not guarantee success. Instead, their high budgets make them more vulnerable to extreme losses, particularly in an era of audience fatigue, shifting market dynamics, and skyrocketing budgets. In many ways, the perceived “safety” of franchises is largely temporary and more speculative than it is guaranteed.

Figures 3a and 3b: Cluster Analysis & Flop Rate Over Time

In Figure 3a, we performed a cluster analysis using k-means methods on budget and worldwide revenue. We also separated films by franchise status (58.2% of films, when made, were part of existing intellectual property). The data shows that large franchise films, as seen in Cluster 2, overwhelmingly dominate the high-budget and tentpole-budget space, as well as high-revenue space. However, the vast amount of intersection between most movies in Cluster 2 and Clusters 3 & 4 suggests that while franchise films do technically still make more revenue, they are not necessarily as separate from the rest of the pack as they may be perceived. 

As a matter of fact, throughout all Top 50 films since 1998, we learned that for each million dollars spent on film budgets, films, on average, made 1.56 million dollars. Technically, by modern standards, this would make the average investment in movies at this level a flop (though, importantly, this does not mean that more movies flop).

Speaking of which, it’s nice to see that the film industry is starting to recover from the deleterious impact of COVID-19. However, combined with our previous insights, the failure to return to pre-pandemic standards suggests potential audience burnout with existing franchises. Further studies may necessitate measuring the impact of streaming, shifting demographics within audiences, and a closer look at which series stick, as well as which ones don’t.

Zooming out a bit, franchise films have a overall 33.9 percent flop rate throughout our database, while original films have a 23.9 percent flop rate. Perhaps rather than thinking about franchises as ‘safe’ investments on well-known IP, we should think of them as what they actually are in practice: studios trying to hit it big with IP that ‘could’ be safe in the future or could potentially lose them a lot of money. 

Figures 4a and 4b (Regression Analysis with and without Outliers)

Here, we analyze the trend of ROI efficiency over time for both franchise and non-franchise films, to see if this has been a constant in the 21st century. We used a regression model with outliers included, plotted on a logarithmic scale for better visibility of differences. The chart indicates that while both categories exhibit relatively stable trends over the years, non-franchise films consistently maintain a higher median ROI efficiency, suggesting that original films tend to generate higher returns relative to their budget.

Our finding aligns with previous insights, reinforcing that non-franchise films—despite lower budgets on average—are often more financially efficient. Franchise films, while still profitable, exhibit slightly more volatility, with some experiencing exceptionally high returns while others barely break even. Interestingly, in recent years, the ROI efficiency for franchise films appears to be stagnating, while non-franchise films show a slight upward trend, suggesting a potential shift in audience preferences or the increasing viability of original material in the market.

The removal of outliers makes it easier to observe that while both categories of films have seen gradual financial improvement, original films consistently achieve comparable or slightly better efficiency, despite lacking the built-in audience advantage of franchises and being less present in our database. While it doesn’t mean that original movies are always better than franchises, the data at least seems to communicate that the opposite idea – that franchises are clearly superior investments – warrants scrutiny.

Conclusions & Reflections

Our research, though elementary, convinced us that it’s worth challenging the recent trend of franchise-whale chasing that traditional studio investment strategies have seemingly prioritized this decade. Instead, film investors would be wise to diversify their respective portfolios and instead target original material. Obviously, further research is needed to break down specific areas where studios are getting fleeced in budget negotiations, as well as the impact that streaming platforms have had on investor strategies. But hey – anything to fight back against the onslaught of slop. So for now, I think the answer to this post’s title is “yes, and it’s bad.”

Appendix

Our Initial Combined Database

Report 0 (more of a table-setter for our interest in film and broad “fun facts”; this one is not very insight-driven.)

Report 1 (more about genre analysis.)

Report 2 (more about budget analysis; why tentpoles are overrated, etc.)

Report 3 (back to intellectual property; most insights from this blog post are covered.)

NOTE: By nature of the assignment requirements, many of these reports are quite repetitive and cite previous reports. This abridged blog post exists as my way of sharing what I found most interesting to my audience. Cheers.