Hierarchies of Value

This article considers the importance of understanding how franchising logic in recent decades has shaped the Conglomerate Hollywood landscape through a gendered lens. Female-led, female-targeted, and female-driven franchise films from the 2000s to 2020s contribute to identifying and complicating industry practices and discursive patterns—cycles of forgetting and remembering—around gender inequity and commercial viability. Ultimately, Hollywood’s engrained hierarchies of value around franchising practices highlight the ways risk, success, and failure are always gendered and how women’s work, storytelling, and experiences are too often devalued in the contemporary IP-driven media business.