Franchise Management Quotes

I don't care what sport you're talking about. What you see with great franchises is structure - a structure that doesn't just take you from year to year, but day to day.

I have been in 'Star Wars' since I was 20. And they're not just doing some goofy sequel, like, to service the hunger of it. It actually has been thought out and it has integrity and they took it seriously, which they didn't have to do, you know? It's hard to do, given the appetite and the angles from which everybody's coming at it.

I think the biggest challenges for franchises are keeping them fresh and exciting, and most times, you need a good bad guy to make that thing continually work, and sometimes they don't.

I would say the main thing is, don't just copy yourself, which is what a lot of sequels do. And in some cases, it works. Like James Bond movies. But James Bond is a different type of character.

What you want to do, particularly when you're dealing with a professional sports league and franchises and people's passionate commitment to the game and for the team they root for is, it has to be sustainable.

We built 'Jade Empire,' then we built 'Mass Effect,' then we built 'Dragon Age.' With those last two, when you're dealing with two big ideas that are on their third iterations, you develop some strategies for managing your lore, or you drown!

While we do have 50 years of terrific Avengers stories, many of which our writing staff has written, along the way, this has to live in its own world.

I do look at 'Modelland' as a franchise.

Disney's clearly in the business of doing giant tent pole movies based on properties that they own. And that's what they should be doing because they're great at doing that.

Part of buying the groceries is having a philosophy and trying to stick to it as best you can, knowing that occasionally you may make an exception. But, you do so knowing you're attempting to do it for a certain reason and you have to be very careful not to try to make too many exceptions, because then you wind up as a franchise with a team full of exceptions, which is not what you want.

Lucasfilm looks out for 'Star Wars.' What are the values inherent in 'Star Wars' that we want to protect? It's fragile to a certain extent in that it's a single IP.

You guys own the Muppets, and you're just kind of sitting on 'em. I really love the Muppets, and I think I know how to bring the franchise back.

Castle Rock and New Line each have their strengths, but the great thing about New Line is that they are a real focused-market, niche-market player who understand franchises. They probably understand the franchise business in motion pictures better than anyone else out there.

I think I've had a lot of experience with watching other people shepherd my ideas with the 'Saw' films. They made four 'Saw' movies without me. I never really had a protective or fierce policy towards that. I let it go.

I looked long and hard at third films in series to see if there were any good ones that I could learn from. And there weren't any that hadn't just gone off the train tracks by their third film. Until, that is, I got to the third 'Lord of the Rings' film.

Oftentimes, when a movie turns into a series, you never retain the creative auspices. You buy the idea, you buy the franchise, and then you bring in a whole new creative team and copy the tone or sensibility.

If your franchise has been around for awhile you have to find ways to keep it fresh.

I'm aware of [Doctor Strange] place within the comic pantheon of it all, the Marvelverse, but I don't email saying, "When are we doing next film?" I'm excited to see.

No writer can really sustain two huge - I hate the word 'franchises.'

With 'Insidious 2,' I wanted to push a potential franchise in the direction I thought it should go in.

Everything that I've worked on at Lucasfilm has been considered canon.

I don't like talking about sequels or spinoffs or franchise until they actually happen, until they actually work with the audience.

See, it's kind of like James Bond. There's a new James Bond every couple of years. Maybe I can do the new 'MacGyver' and put my own twist on it.

I don't know when the last time was that Steven Spielberg or George Lucas made a movie with Universal, but I can tell you that Universal is leading the charge. They're looking at film differently. They're planning ahead in a way that I've never seen a studio do before. They're believing in a relationship between fan and film franchise, in a new way. They're more receptive to an audience, in part because of social media, in a way we've never been allowed.

My mandate to myself since I've been involved in these movies was 'make every single movie different, so there's never 'X-Men' fatigue.'