Sequelitis: Diagnosing Hollywood’s Franchise Addiction

You may think that the goal of movie studios is to churn out as many sequels as quickly as possible, but there's so much more strategy that goes into sequel production than what meets the eye.

In this episode, we sit down with Professor Subimal Chatterjee from the Binghamton University School of Management to explore the science behind movie sequels. Discover why studios strategically time their sequels, and learn the surprising truth about how sequels perform at the box office compared to critical reviews.

Chapters

• 0:00 Cold Open
• 0:41 Intro
• 2:02 The Research and Main Findings
• 10:30 The Aha! Moment
• 11:16 The Implications
• 16:40 Outro

Transcript

We all see the constant stream of sequels that release in theatres, but studios aren’t just thoughtlessly churning them out.What do you mean?

Studios do more than just constantly make new iterations of a movie. There’s strategy involved – how soon after the original movie, how many big changes to make – and that strategy is crucial to its success.

I'm David Hermanovitch,

and this is The Aha! Moment
presented by Binghamton University.

And when it comes to movies,
it seems like they come faster than we can
keep up with, especially these days
when every single movie seems
to be in a cinematic universe and
it feels like everything is a sequel.

But what is the science behind
movie studios working to
keep interest in an ever
expanding movie library?

Today we're talking to Subimal
Chatterjee about just that.

He's a professor at the Binghamton
University School of Management,
and he's explored
movie sequels extensively...
how they perform, the timing of them, and
how studios keep people buying tickets.

So thank you for coming on the show.

I thank you very much,
David. It's a pleasure.

Now, I'm really excited for this one
in particular, because it's a running
joke between me and my wife at home
where there's a lot of movie sequels
that a lot of people dislike that I love,
and she roasts me relentlessly for that.

I'm a big fan of Shrek 2.

I think it's better than the original.

My hot take — Frosty the Snowman 2
is better than
Frosty the Snowman, the original.

I know it's not a movie, a movie release,
but what I'm saying is
I've brought you on to settle a dispute
and just tell me that I'm right.

I’m kidding.

I never get into a dispute
between a husband and a wife.

You can never be right, I guess.

Yeah. So this.

So this, this research
that we're going to talk about
today is quite interesting to me.

And I'm sure a lot of people, it's
something that we all think
about, movie sequels, as I mentioned,
but I think the general conception is that
studios just churn out
as much as possible,
as fast as possible, and that
might not always be the case,
so I'm really anxious
to hear about your research.

I'm just curious, what sparked it for you?

Yeah, that's a very good question.

And, you know, it takes me way
back into my childhood
and when I was growing up in India,
and this was in the early 70s and 80s,
much, much before the era of the internet.

There were superstars,
there were superstars.

And one in particular, Amitabh Bachchan,
and I don't know why
I was such a fan of his.

And in those days, the prize was the
first day, first show ticket.

And I would stand for hours
in line in the heat
just to get that ticket.

And mind you, the movies
were not always good.

They were regularly,
regularly panned by the critics.

But to me, it just didn't matter.

And I just couldn't understand why.

So fast forward, I come to
the United States,
get my PhD, and then I joined the State
University of New York.

Great, great system.

And there I have to find the
independent research stream,
and what’s the best research stream for me?

I went back — movies.

Movies and sequels and star power.

And what makes those
people stand in those lines?

I mean, figuratively speaking, nowadays
no one stands in line anyway,
no one even goes to the theatres.

They’re waiting on their couch.

Yeah, no one even goes to
movie theaters these days,
but it was something very,
very close to my heart.

So what you did was, and just broadly,
you looked at a lot of movie titles
and their sequels as well.

And I know with this research you looked at
when they were released,
in this window after release,
how they performed — the parent
movie, also the sequel.

And I know it might be easy
to just kind of
look at dollar total, dollar total,
which did better.

But I know you're getting
a lot of data in terms of this,
all this information coming in
from box office numbers.

How do you look at it
in a way that lets you determine,
okay, this is what the strategy is?

That's an extremely,
extremely good question.

And you mentioned there's
lots and lots of data.

Correct.

And so you have to understand
my research is theory-driven.

So I have an idea. I have a theory,
and then I look at the data to see
if the data is consistent with my theory.

So let's go back and talk about sequels
that you mention a lot.

Sequels are first of all an innovation.

It's like a new product, but it's
very different from other innovations.

It's a relative innovation
because the parent comes first
and the sequel comes second,
so the sequel is always evaluated
with respect to the parent.

That makes it relative innovation.

So R and I, that was the first two words
of our theory.

The second is why do people go and
watch sequels?

And therein was our theory.

The theory suggested two very,
very different streams.

One was comfort.

That's the C in R.I.C.

Comfort is, “I saw something
a few months ago or a year ago.
I loved it and I wanted the comfort
of that experience again.”

Re-live that comfort.

But then what happens?

You get sequel one, sequel two,
sequel three, sequel four.

And what happens?

You start getting — I hate to use this word —
you start getting bored.

So what do we need?

We need stimulation.

That's that last letter S.

R.I.C.S.
Relative innovation, comfort,
and stimulation.

The challenge to studio managers
when we did this research
was to balance the last two —
comfort versus stimulation.

How long do you continue with
the original change?

Very little, if nothing at all.

And then when do you make that change?

When do you anticipate
people getting bored?

So that, in a nutshell, is
what my research is all about.

What you found was —
was it pretty uniform that after a certain point,
start making changes,
or is it kind of on a spectrum
depending on the movie franchise?

One funny thing about
theoretical research
driven by data again
is our results never speak
to an individual movie.

They always speak to an average.

So what we found, and to
answer your question directly,
is that around three and four,
boredom starts to kick in.

And on the average — again,
I stress this word “on the average” —
studio managers start, or the good ones,
to make the changes around those times.

And that's where the stimulation
part of our framework kicks in.

Interesting.

And I'm just thinking back to
longer-running franchises.

I don't know how my mind keeps
on going back to Shrek.

Shrek one, Shrek two, pretty similar.

Then that third one just kind of
took it in a completely different direction.

And then if you think also
about the Alien franchise —
Alien, Aliens was very successful,
although it did change some things.

Then you go to Alien 3
and it seems to totally change.

They seemingly threw away
a lot of what happened in Aliens.

That is absolutely true.

Again, as I told you before,
it's the change
and the point in time you make the change.

And then maybe nostalgia creeps in.

Maybe parents want to see
Tom Cruise again in Top Gun.

So they bring him back as an instructor.

Whenever I see those little things happening,
it always interests me.

I say, “Oh yes, there's a theory behind it.”

And I just love studying these nuances.

I love studying these changes,
but at the back of my mind it's always,
“What’s the theory that’s driving these changes?”

It’s not random.

So you're collecting all this data,
analyzing all these movie franchises and sequels.

What's something you found
that would be an “aha!” moment
for the average person?

To me, an “aha!” moment
is about contradictions.

Sequels, on average,
did better than parent movies,
but they were disliked by critics.

That contradiction led to
another stream of research.

That was the “aha!” moment.

And that's where I get a lot of flak
from my wife — liking sequels people don’t.

There are sequels people view as better,
like Empire Strikes Back
or Aliens.

So it’s interesting when movies get poor reviews
but still perform well at the box office.

That’s true.

Another question we explored was
whether critics influence viewers
or simply predict what viewers will do.

That’s a conversation for another day.

So what does this research say
about studio strategy?

If studios are data-driven,
this should be part of their strategy.

But consumer tastes change.

There’s a new generation of consumers.

So studios perform a balancing act
between catering to new tastes
and not deviating too far from the original.

Is it sometimes necessary to diverge?
I guess so.

That’s up to individual studio managers.

We just talk about the average.

And we complain when it comes out!

And nowadays this research
is more relevant than ever.

Everything is a cinematic universe.

Marvel, Star Wars, streaming shows —
it’s all getting very complicated.

One implication of the research
is that one size doesn’t fit all.

Studio managers should study
their audiences carefully.

Moviegoers and streaming audiences
may not be the same.

Study your audience first
and then decide on your product.

That was true 50 years ago.
It’s true now.
And it will be true 50 years from now.

So study your audience.

If there's one takeaway for me,
it's that studios need to know their consumers
and that clear strategies exist
for optimizing sequels.

Subimal, what would you like people
to take away from this research?

Studios need to know their consumers,
and also that no two consumers are the same.

There is considerable heterogeneity in tastes.

Do tastes translate into different channels?

Once managers understand similarities
and differences,
they can balance better.

Well, thank you.

And that was Subimal Chatterjee,
professor at the Binghamton
University School of Management.

I'm David Hermanovitch,
and this has been The Aha! Moment podcast
presented by Binghamton University.

Thank you for listening.

We'll be back next month.

The Moment is a Binghamton
University podcast.

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