The media "franchise" of the past thirty years has deployed intellectual property across multiple sites of production, sustaining persistent but dynamic networks of content through collaborative exchange across media platforms, industries, creative nodes, and local cultures. Throughout this process, franchises have proliferated imaginary worlds---common but contested cultural realms that, despite fictional status, possess real value to both their creators and consumers. Amid changing economics, narrative boundaries, and reception practices, franchises have produced media worlds through formalized industrial licensing contracts as well as the informal "enfranchisement" of consumers as invested participants and ongoing collaborators. Shared between intellectual property owners, licensed partners, and consumers alike, media franchises are not homogenous brands but socially networked worlds in which heterogeneous economic, creative, and cultural interests collide.;This dissertation intervenes in studies of culture industries, textual forms, and media convergence to develop the concept of the franchise as a theoretical and historical model for understanding cultural production. Chapter 1 deconstructs the underlying forms, practices, and discourses of the franchise to re-theorize its function in media culture since the 1980s. It redefines the franchise as a networked system of content generation in which participants from diverse institutional and subjective positions---franchisors and franchisees---share cultural resources. Each successive chapter examines the historical processes by which actors in those networks have struggled over time to negotiate these collaborative, decentralized production relationships. Chapter 2 explores the institutional challenges Marvel Comics faced in transplanting X-Men to the film, television, and video game industries. Battlestar Galactica provides in Chapter 3 a means to examine creative tensions that have accompanied shared production of television worlds, while Chapter 4 explores invested participation in imaginary worlds by enfranchised consumers of Lost and 24. Finally, Chapter 5 analyzes franchises shared globally across localized markets, situating Transformers as an historical site of transnational collaboration. Together, these content networks and imaginary worlds evince a franchise culture in which diverse creators, institutions, and audiences have come into ongoing, negotiated relationships with one another to sustain the production and reproduction of media culture.
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