Examining The Franchise Economy
Chapter 1 of "Anatomy of a Franchise Economy"
Recently, CNBC ran a piece subtitled “Hollywood’s Old Movie Sequel Trick Keeps Falling Flat.” The article itself was a nuanced, thoughtful look at how existing IP performs against original ideas at the box office. But the subtitle kept nagging at me. Sequels keep falling flat? My gut said the opposite was true; that it’s originals that are falling flat.
So, I built the spreadsheet. I went through all 4,751 films that played in 500 or more U.S. theaters from 2000 through early 2026 and classified each one as either an original or a franchise entry. A more detailed breakdown of these categories is in the appendix, but the guiding question was “Does this property have more than one film that played in 500 or more theaters?”
This is chapter 1 of an open series on the economics of franchise filmmaking in 21st-century America. Over the coming weeks I’m going to be examining the rise of franchise films in the American box office by digging through genre dynamics, budget efficiency, opening weekends, seasonal patterns, and more. This first chapter sets the table by simply looking at how much of the box office belongs to franchise films, and how that pattern has changed over time.
The split
Before this analysis, I would’ve guessed that the proportion of franchise films being released has ballooned over the past 25 years. I would have guessed wrong.
The share of wide releases that are part of a franchise has been remarkably stable. About one in five wide releases in 2000 was a franchise entry. In 2025, it’s one in four. That’s growth, but it’s not huge growth, and the release calendar is not overrun by franchises anymore than it has been for a quarter of a century.
The money, however, tells a completely different story. Franchise entries claimed 69% of total domestic gross in 2025, up from 37% in 2000. The dollar share nearly doubled while the title share barely moved. Hollywood still makes mostly originals, and audiences mostly pay to see franchises.
Where the money went
Over the length of the study period, the total U.S. box office grew from its starting point of 8 billion in 2000 to its so-far peak of 15 billion in 2016 and has since fallen to 10 billion in 2025. I wanted to see how much of that revenue has gone to franchise films.
In 2000, franchise entries earned $3.0 billion and originals earned $5.1 billion. Franchise dollars overtook originals for good around 2012, and by 2025 the gap originals once had over franchises had reversed with franchises bringing a $7.1 billion against the originals $3.2 billion.
You may notice the first crossover in 2003. Good eye. A large part of that crossover can be attributed to films that weren’t yet franchise entries such as Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean. Consequently, my model actually underestimates franchise growth because I chose to grandfather in originals that became franchises.
The total box office showed only modest nominal growth (8 to 10 billion), but the franchise gross more than doubled while originals lost nearly 40% of their revenue. Overall, theater-going habits have declined precipitously in the last decade, and when people do buy tickets it is increasingly to see the latest installment in an existing franchise, despite the smorgasbord of original offerings.
Given contemporary discourse around franchise fatigue, this was not the discovery I had expected to make. The talk of audiences being sick of franchises is not showing up in the revenue data. Rather, money is concentrating toward franchise films even as originals dominate the release calendar by volume.
Franchise films earn more. period.
In the pre-MCU era (2000–07), the median franchise entry earned about 3x the median original. That’s a healthy advantage, but originals could hold their own. A $27 million median gross was enough to sustain a healthy mid-budget ecosystem.
However, by 2021–25, the franchise premium had exploded to 11x. And while this isn’t a totally fair comparison because franchise films often come with franchise film budgets and marketing campaigns, not all of this growth ought to be attributed to linearly increasing franchise box office returns. In fact, the franchise median actually fell from a 2008–14 peak of $103 million to $70 million.
In other words, the multiple between franchise and original box office returns blew up because originals collapsed harder. The median original wide release now grosses only $6 million compared to the $33 million they brought in as recently as 2008–14.
The vanishing middle
Where did those low-to-midrange originals go?
Adult dramas, original comedies, mid-budget thrillers used to anchor the 15-90m range and they’ve either migrated to streaming or stopped getting wide releases altogether. In the early 2000s, 60% of original wide releases landed in that middle band. By 2021–25, the middle shrank to 28%.
Meanwhile, originals grossing under $15 million ballooned from 30% to 67%. The under-$15M tier, once the smallest slice of the original-film pie, is now the largest by a wide margin. And, remember, these are all films that at their peak were in over 500 theaters simultaneously.
What’s left at the multiplex is a bimodal split of franchise tentpoles on one side and micro-grossing originals on the other. The original-film middle class has declined, and it doesn’t look like it is coming back.
Which franchises have made the most?
Since 2000, the MCU has generated $13.0 billion across 37 wide releases, which is more than the next two families combined. DC sits second at $5.6 billion across 29 films. Star Wars hit $3.5 billion in just 8.
Disney Remakes have quietly become the fourth-largest franchise family at $3.3 billion across 12 films. While this chart simply reports the leaderboard as a sum of nominal dollars, it would be interesting to see this same leaderboard adjusted for inflation and then recalculated as ROI over reported budgets. I would guess this would become a James Wan shrine as Conjuring and Saw shoot way up. Maybe in a future chapter we’ll take a look.
What this table doesn’t show is the momentum. 2025 set the all-time record for franchise breadth with 60 franchise entries from 52 distinct franchise families in a single year. MCU tentpoles, Disney remakes, anime expansions (Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen), legacy sequels (Mission: Impossible, Jurassic World), horror franchises (Final Destination, M3GAN 2.0). The superhero-or-bust era is giving way to a broader franchise ecosystem mining anime, games, nostalgia, and faith content simultaneously.
What the data says
Franchise saturation is a money story, not a title story. The franchise share of wide releases barely moved from one in five in 2000 to one in four in 2025. But the franchise share of dollars nearly doubled, from 37% to 69%. Originals still dominate the release calendar by volume, but they’ve been financially marginalized.
The money concentration is the actual story. Two in three dollars flow to franchise entries. Right now the theatrical market is a franchise delivery machine with an original-film sideshow. This was not always the case. In 2000, originals outgrossed franchises by ~2 billion.
The original-film middle class has been hollowed out. Median gross for wide release original films has fallen from $33 million to $6 million in a decade. Very few films that hit 500 theaters have a sub $6 million budget, and the originals still getting wide releases are struggling in historically unprecedented ways.
“Franchise fatigue” is not in the data. Franchise share of gross peaked at 76% in 2021 and sits at 69% in 2025. Individual franchises flame out (Madame Web, Transformers One) but the category outperforms original filmmaking.
The pipeline is diversifying. Fifty-two franchise families active in a single year is new territory. In other words, the total number of franchises is increasing, as each successful movie gets a sequel or live action remake on increasingly shorter time frames.
Next week we’ll break down who these franchise families actually are, where they come from, and how the ecosystem has shifted under Hollywood’s feet.
Methodology
(Usually I actually have a methodology, but this was just kind of descriptive stuff. There are nonetheless a few notes on data worth including.)
What is a Franchise? If a film spawned a second theatrical installment, it is part of a franchise. Sequels, prequels, spinoffs, reboots, cinematic-universe installments, Disney live-action remakes, TV-to-film adaptations, and remakes of earlier films all count. The first entry in a series is retroactively grandfathered into the franchise once a second installment exists — so The Conjuring, Shrek, Frozen, and The Hunger Games are all franchise entries because their sequels exist. A standalone film that never got a follow-up — like Warcraft or Uncharted — stays original. When Hollywood reboots the same name, I track each run separately, so Spider-Man alone spans five franchise lines.
Data. U.S. box office database, January 2000 through February 2026.
Wide release. Any film reaching 500+ peak domestic theaters.
Classification. Three-tier: (1) ~800 hand-coded overrides for ambiguous titles, reboots, remakes, Disney remakes, TV adaptations, first entries grandfathered by sequel existence, and same-name franchise reboots tracked by franchise line; (2) word-boundary regex matching for ~50 franchise families; (3) sequel-number catch-all for remaining titles. First entries are classified as franchise if a second theatrical installment was produced; standalone films remain original. Re-releases are excluded from all analyses.
Gross figures. Cumulative domestic gross by calendar year. For franchise family totals, calendar-year carryover rows are merged to avoid double-counting. Annual summaries use per-year figures directly, which may slightly inflate totals for December releases.
Limitations. Classification is subjective at the margins. The grandfathering rule (counting a first entry as franchise only if a second installment was produced) changes a film’s classification when a sequel is greenlit. Standalone films like Warcraft and Uncharted are classified as original, which slightly understates franchise IP’s presence on the calendar. 2025 data includes films still in theatrical runs at the time of analysis.