How a mouse eats a multiplex.
Chapter 3 of "Anatomy of a Franchise Economy"
I think that just about any person who has seen a movie in the last quarter century, any movie at all, already knows which studio has won the franchise wars. Disney. Disney sits atop a lucrative throne of IP that they exploit in increasingly innovative ways.
Some have called their efforts to remake, reboot, revamp, and revise every successful ounce of their existing catalog is a sign of creative bankruptcy. Not me. While the stories may not be breaking new ground, their revenues are breaking the bank in new ways.
This chapter is going to examine how Disney crafted their money-printing franchise machine, and how that strategy is showing its first signs of stagnancy.
Over the 2000–07 era, the domestic box office was genuinely competitive. Warner Bros. led at about 22%, but behind it four studios were packed within three percentage points of one another (Disney 14%, Fox 13%, Universal 12%, and Sony 11%). No single studio averaged more than a quarter of the market.
By 2015–19, Disney’s share had roughly doubled to 28%. In an absolutely unrivaled year, Disney released Avengers: Endgame, The Lion King, Toy Story 4, Frozen II, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Captain Marvel, and Aladdin. Those seven alone earned over $3.4 billion domestic. Then, Disney unhinged its jaw and swallowed Fox, giving it access to a new library, production pipeline, and release slate.[^1]
Post-merger, every Fox-branded release is a Disney release. When you count both labels together, the combined Disney entity has averaged roughly 28% of the domestic box office from 2015 to 2025, a share no other studio has come close to in the modern era.[^2] The Fox merger (2019) was the latest course in a string of acquisitions that transformed Disney from a studio that made animated musicals into the dominant franchise conglomerate of the 21st century (Pixar, 2006; Marvel, 2009; Lucasfilm, 2012). The MCU alone has generated $13.7 billion in domestic gross across 37 wide-release entries, including pre-Disney entries originally distributed by Paramount.
Every studio crossed the franchise Rubicon
The franchise revolution isn’t just a Disney story. Every major studio dramatically increased its dependence on franchise revenue over the 25-year period.
In the pre-MCU era (2000-07), franchise revenue was significant but not yet dominant across the board. Warner Bros. was the only studio earning a majority of its gross from franchise IP, at 51%, driven by Harry Potter and early DC films. Disney sat at 48%, Fox at 42%, and Lionsgate at 41%. Sony (35%), Paramount (26%) still made the bulk of their money from originals.
By 2021-25, every major studio earned a majority of its gross from franchise films:
Disney: 91%. Nine out of every ten Disney dollars now come from franchise IP.
Paramount: 84%. Driven by Mission: Impossible, Transformers, Sonic, and legacy sequels.
Fox/Disney: 71%. Post-merger Fox-branded releases including Avatar: The Way of Water, Planet of the Apes, and Alien.
Sony: 69%. Spider-Man, Spider-Verse, Ghostbusters, and Bad Boys.
Universal: 69%. Wicked, Despicable Me, Jurassic World, and Super Mario Bros.
Warner Bros.: 66%. DC, the Lord of the Rings franchise, Dune, and the Conjuring universe.
Lionsgate: 63%. The Hunger Games, John Wick, and Saw.
Originals are sinking everywhere
And, as we’ve explored before, if franchises go up, then original films go down. Here’s another angle on it that we haven’t seen in previous chapters.
The big six studios used to be the safest home for an original wide release. In 2000–07, the median original distributed by a major studio grossed $31 million, enough to be solidly profitable. That median actually rose to $42 million in 2008–14 before collapsing, and by 2021–25 it had dropped to $17 million, a 44% decline from the starting point and a 59% fall from the peak.[^1]
Mid-major distributors (Lionsgate, MGM, STX) saw a similar trajectory dropping from $17 million median down to $12 million.
But the most dramatic collapse happened among independent distributors. The rise of A24, Neon, and other specialty labels brought 380 in the 2021–25 period alone, up from 110 in 2000–07. Unfortunately, the median independent original grosses just $2.5 million in wide release. That’s barely enough to cover P&A costs, let alone production.
The paradox is that there are still many original wide releases from independent distributors, but each one makes far less money.
Disney’s franchise arsenal
Disney’s dominance becomes even starker when you look at its franchise portfolio. I already mentioned the 10-ton gorilla of the MCU, documented here at 10.9 billion because I’m excluding the entries not originally distributed by Disney. Star Wars adds another $2.8 billion across the five Disney-era films. Just these two franchise families, distributed by Disney, exceed most other studios’ entire franchise output combined.
But Disney has another bona fide franchise angle that other studios are just barely catching on to. Live action remakes. From Cinderella to Maleficent to The Lion King, that collectively represent a $3.8 billion franchise family that barely existed before 2014. Add in their linear stories pipeline such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Toy Story, and Frozen, and Disney controls the most diversified franchise portfolio in the industry. It has superhero IP (MCU), space-opera IP (Star Wars), children’s animation IP (Pixar/Disney Animation sequels), nostalgia IP (live-action remakes), and adventure IP (Pirates, Indiana Jones).
No other studio has this breadth in the franchise segment. Warner Bros. has DC (in a creative reset under James Gunn) and the Wizarding World (dormant after the Fantastic Beasts series underperformed). Universal has built new tentpoles (Wicked, Super Mario) but its legacy franchises Jurassic and Fast & Furious show signs of audience fatigue. Sony is disproportionately dependent on a single character (Spider-Man) whose film rights it acquired from Marvel before Disney’s purchase of the comics company.
The squeeze on everyone else
Disney’s franchise strategy created a competitive dynamic that forced every other studio to franchise-or-die. When one corporate entity captures more than a quarter of the total box office with franchise tentpoles, the remainder is split among five or more competitors. That compression leaves less room for original films, which have lower per-title revenue expectations but also lower marketing efficiency.
The result is a two-tier studio system:
Franchise-rich studios (Disney, Warner Bros., Universal) that can weather individual flops because their portfolio includes durable, multi-entry franchises.
Franchise-poor studios that depend on one or two franchise families and are disproportionately exposed when those families underperform. Sony without Spider-Man, Paramount without Mission: Impossible and Transformers, Lionsgate without Hunger Games. These are studios with thin franchise cushions.
Franchise-rich studios have had some beautiful misfires (The Flash, The Marvels, Madame Web) but they absorb them. Deep portfolios mean no single entry is existential, and broad universes mean you can just stop mentioning the bad parts. Marvel spent three films building Kang into the next Thanos. When Jonathan Majors was fired, they renamed the capstone Avengers: Doomsday, hired Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, and quietly pretended the Council of Kangs never happened. The studios with thin franchise cushions don't get that luxury.
Five takeaways
Disney’s franchise acquisition strategy was the defining move of 21st-century Hollywood. Three purchases (Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm) and one merger (Fox) took the combined Disney entity from 14% market share to an average of roughly 28% over 2015–25 — the highest in the industry. No competitor has replicated this approach.
Every major studio now earns a majority of its gross from franchises. This is a structural change, not a cyclical one. The 2000-era major-studio model of a diversified slate of originals, and a couple of franchise tentpoles is effectively gone at the Big Six level.
Original films are failing at every studio tier. Big Six originals declined 44% in median gross. Independent originals now gross $2.5 million at the median. The theatrical original film is not dead, but it is economically marginal at scale. Help us, A24-Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope.
Studio competition is now franchise-portfolio competition. Disney has ten individual billion-dollar franchise families. Other studios are trying to run their playbook. Planning a year of releases is now more about franchise triage than managing a slate of individual releases.
The franchise-poor studios are the fragile ones. Disney absorbs a Marvels because it has the MCU, Star Wars, Pixar sequels, and live-action remakes behind it. Paramount without Mission: Impossible or Lionsgate without John Wick have no such cushion. The competitive gap the data reveals is not between franchise-dependent and franchise-diversified studios; it’s between studios with deep franchise portfolios and studios without them.
[^1]: They merged, but the metaphor. Fight me.
[^2]: Era averages and medians use four periods: 2000–07, 2008–14, 2015–19, and 2021–25. The pandemic year 2020 is excluded from era analysis because theater closures make that year’s grosses non-comparable. The yearly market-share chart includes 2020.