What is Job 1, when you run a pop super-franchise?

Mourning Doctor Who, while continuing to ponder the news surrounding Narnia

Greetings from America’s vast overlooked region — the Mountain Time Zone.

My family lived in Colorado for a decade, mostly in the 1980s, and we know the state inside out. I still feel the same way, whenever I get up into the high mountains and look around. It’s like the Rockies are saying, “What is man, that Thou are mindful of him?”

The wonderful, beautiful, tattered old quilt that is the Southern Highlands is my home, but the Rocky Mountains still amaze me.

Anyway, this is a reminder that I am on the road for two weeks and, while in travel mode, I will be posting — to the whole Rational Sheep list — three times a week. Also, I just scheduled a time slot to do the “Crossroads” recording. So that will be coming this weekend.

Now, here is the Rational Sheep question for the day, and I hope to get lots of comments from readers on this one.

What is Job 1, for the managers of the entertainment franchises that, for decades, have dominated our shared popular culture?

I’m being very practical here. I’m talking about money, as well as matters of quality or even “art” of some kind. Consider this a sequel to posts such as “Age of the crashing Hollywood empires” and “Disney Wars: $Billions at stake.”

Now, the big questions:

Is Job 1 to please the core fans that made your product a profitable franchise in the first place? Is it to be faithful to the source material for the franchise, whether we’re talking about classic books, comics, foundation films or whatever? Should managers be faithful to the “canon” of a franchise, to its core principles and worldview? Can they build on it while being faithful to the past?

Or is Job 1 finding a way to EXPAND the franchise into a new generation, reaching the “modern audiences” that allegedly represent the future? After all, the folks in the 18-40 demographic of a decade or more ago are not the anxious young ticket buyers of today. Should you take your franchise into new forms of technology (think streamed series instead of films)? And once you have moved past your classic stories, who will write new material that matches the quality of the classics?

Once again, I am thinking about obvious brandnames — Star Wars, classic Disney, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Star Trek, J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Pixar, Harry Potter, the Marvel cinematic universe, Dune, Doctor Who, etc. What did I forget? Can you imagine someone attempting to reboot the Godfather franchise?

This list has to include C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia, even though those complex, multi-layered parables have been very hard to film.

Now, a personal confession: I am, or was, a Whovian. For me, that began with the Fourth Doctor, the great Tom Baker, during that pre-cable experiment in which the lords of British television brought a few classic series to Public Television here in America.

Can you say “Monty Python”? Also, can you imagine anyone trying to reboot that comedy franchise with new writers and performers? You know that someone will try to do that, eventually.

I reconnected with the Doctor Who world with “The Eleventh Hour,” which introduced the stunningly young and talented Matt Smith, and then worked my way back into the rest of “New Who.” Then the Peter Capaldi era had amazing highs (this may be the greatest Doctor Who episode ever) and some puzzling lows, as the writing began to become inconsistent. The writing would, in later years, collapse (IMHO).

Many will focus on issues such as the “first female”, and gay, Doctor or the “first black,” and gay, Doctor. However, I think that the key to the looming death of this franchise was “The Timeless Child,” the episode that took a sledgehammer to the very foundations of Doctor Who canon. Nothing was the same. The past was a tragic, flowed joke.

I was one of millions who stopped watching, as the global audience fell by 50% or so.

The video at the top of this post is rather poignant, especially compared to the slash-and-burn style in most Nerdrotic offerings. This is the work of a Whovian who has been pushed past anger and into a kind of snarky grief.

Now, what pop-culture franchise holds that power for you? Was “The Last Jedi” one of those lines in the sand?

I will deal with a very different kind of entertainment franchise later this week. Hint: I hope you will be greatly diverted.

But let me end with an update on the great silence surrounding Netflix Narnia. The big question: What would C.S Lewis think of a gender-neutral Aslan, the Great Lion. who is the Christ figure of the Narnia world? For background, see “Let Aslan first be shaved!” and “Can Meryl Streep provide Aslan's deep voice?”

There are few updates in this Vogue catch-all called “From Meryl Streep as Aslan to Emma Mackey as the White Witch, Everything We Know So Far About Greta Gerwig’s Narnia.”

I don’t think that millions and millions of Narnia readers, in multiple generations, will be disturbed to hear that Daniel “James Bond” Craig appears likely to play the magician in “The Magician’s Nephew.” Streep as Aslan remains a big topic of online discussion.

But here is the key paragraph for me, in terms of my Job 1 questions.

With Gerwig at the helm, expect the unexpected

After her spirited directorial debut, Lady Bird, the filmmaker tossed out the rulebook with her time-jumping take on Little Women and defied all her doubters on Barbie, so it’s safe to assume that this reimagining of Narnia, which she’ll be writing as well as helming, won’t be an entirely traditional reboot. Amy Pascal, who’ll be producing the new project and previously worked with Gerwig on Little Women, went even further, telling Deadline last December that it’d be “a very new take on Narnia. It’s all about rock and roll.” Make of that what you will.

I’ll be blunt: Does this sound like a good financial move?

Is Job 1 retaining the vast, global audience for Narnia and the worldview of Lewis, or is the goal to infuriate them, while appealing to the gods of Hollywood and “modern audiences”?

Discuss. Please.