Adaptation Essay Prize Winner: Franchising/Adaptation

This paper draws attention to the role of adaptation in entertainment franchising and positions the recent ascendancy of the fictional franchise as a context for the continuing proliferation of adaptations. It argues that where adaptation is carried out as part of the development of an entertainment franchise, it is a distinct variant of the practice, part of a particular market strategy, contributing to and drawing on a particular kind of fictional experience, and negotiating particular types of intertextual relation. The essay thus elaborates a particularized critical position for reading the franchise adaptation by examining key protocols of franchise storytelling and theorizing how they transform and interact with adaptive processes and dynamics. It also calls more generally for further critical consideration of how the identity and status of adaptation as cultural practice and fictional form may need to be reappraised and re-theorized in the light of trends towards convergence in contemporary media landscapes and the coterminous saturation of these landscapes with a range of genres of cross-media content and textual re-visions.