The 6 Laws of Dying Hollywood Franchises

Here's how you kill an entire genre

Back in 1958, the world was hurtling into the future at a rapid pace.

The US launched its first space satellite. IBM released its 7070 computer (which weighed a paltry 23,150 pounds). And Texas Instruments built the first integrated circuit in the history of the world.

The cultural scene was just as progressive. Vladimir Nabokov published his controversial novel Lolita. In music, Jerry Lee Lewis lit up the dance floor with “Great Balls of Fire,” while jazz fans were crowding into the Five Spot to hear Thelonious Monk performing with John Coltrane.

But what were the most popular TV shows that year?

Here’s the top ten.

Source

Eight of the top ten shows during the 1958-59 season were westerns.

Spaceships were in the news every day back then, but on TV it was just horses—and occasionally a covered wagon. Each of the three networks was caught up in a time warp, partying like it was 1899.

Any fool could see that they were saturating the market. Yet the studios kept launching new westerns with regularity, although with less confidence, for another decade, more or less.

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In 1959, Warner Bros posed some of their TV cowboy stars in a single photo (Source)

Back in 1955, the three US TV networks had introduced three new western-themed series—Gunsmoke, Cheyenne, and Wyatt Earp. But two years later, the networks ramped up their investment in cowboys, launching nine new westerns that fall.

And it got worse.

In 1958, these three networks introduced ten more western series. On some nights, you could watch cowboys for two hours straight on ABC. CBS and NBC also started scheduling back-to-back Wild West shows.

I need to stress that the western was already an exhausted genre long before 1960. Movie theaters had relied on cowboys as an audience draw going back at least to Broncho Billy Anderson and The Great Train Robbery (1903).

Western-themed magazines of the 1930s and 1940s

And cheap books and magazines with stories of the Wild West had already been around for decades at that point. By my measure, nostalgia for the old West dates back to the launch of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show on May 19, 1883 in Omaha, Nebraska—four years after the invention of the gasoline engine.

Poster for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show—the first major cowboy nostalgia business

But in those early days of the western genre, many readers actually rode horses—so the stories had some plausible connection to their lives. In the late 1950s, in contrast, these stories were stale formulas served up as pure fantasies.

In other words, they were very similar to the spaceship and superhero fare of the current day.

The peak moment of popularity for the movie western was actually the mid-1920s—although the genre continued to draw large cinema audiences until the start of World War II.

Movie westerns reached their peak popularity during the silent film era! (Source)

Even in 1925, many people in the audience had actually relied on horses for transportation in their youth. The stories and settings weren’t fantasies, but something they had experienced firsthand—or heard about from someone who did.

Maybe it was just nostalgia that brought them to the movie theater. But at least it was nostalgia for something real.

But the situation was very different in the 1960s. That’s when the western started to die.

But what killed it then—and why didn’t it happen sooner?

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Younger viewers were the first to abandon the western—a telling sign, especially when you consider that, back in the 1930s, children and teens had been the core audience for the genre.

By the time Gunsmoke went off the air in 1975, the few remaining fans were old-timers—maybe the same ones who had gone to movie theaters to cheer for Roy Rogers in the 1930s. That show had been the most popular TV series in the US for four seasons in the late 1950s. But a cowboy series would never do that again.

Youngsters lost interest in westerns despite a proliferation of merchandise. During my childhood, I paid no attention to the cowboy genre—nor did any of my friends. But brand merchandise was everywhere. We could buy Gunsmoke comic books, trading cards, lunchboxes, and—of course!—toy guns, among other paraphernalia.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that these products did not develop the market—they merely saturated it.

Even more revealing: the movie and TV stars at the top of the cowboy hierarchy were getting older—much older. When James Arness took the role of Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke, he was just 32 years old. He was 53 when the series ended its run—but he continued to play Dillon in spinoffs into his mid-sixties.

James Arness kept playing Matt Dillon, decade after decade

The same reliance on aging cowboys was evident at movie theaters. John Wayne was still the top western movie star until his death at age 72.

You can laugh at that, but Hollywood has pushed to even more ridiculous extremes with Harrison Ford. The studios cast him in three action franchises (Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Blade Runner) at an even older age than Wayne in his final film. (In a curious twist, this was Wayne’s little known role in Star Wars.)

This is not the sign of a healthy genre. Hollywood is now suffering at the box office, but you could have predicted it years ago, just based on its aging stars and franchises.

By the way, the music industry faces the same problem. Major labels and concert promoters rely too much on aging superstars—the exact opposite of what they did a generation ago.

Old familiar names are great for nostalgia, but a recipe for commercial disaster in the long run. Even Rolling Stones eventually gather moss.

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How will this play out in the future? Well, let’s summarize what we learned from the rise and fall of the western genre.

1. Genres die slowly, especially popular genres with large mass audiences. In those instances, the decline can continue for decades after a genre’s commercial peak.

2. The final stages of decline are marked by total market saturation—reaching ridiculous levels. Far more product is churned out than even the core audience can absorb.

3. The proliferation of merchandise aims to expand the franchise, but actually accelerates the pace of decline.

4. During the period of decline, the average age of the core fan base gets older. Youngsters may continue to have some interest in the genre, but without the enthusiasm of the old days.

5. Even more ominous, the box office stars start showing their age—and are far too old to lead any movement. They are hired out of desperation, because holding on to old fans is now more important than attracting new ones.

6. As a result, everything about the genre starts to feel stale. The stories were fresher twenty years ago. The lead stars were definitely fresher twenty years ago. The only thing that isn’t stale is the movie popcorn out in the lobby—and even that’s not a sure thing.

This is obviously happening with almost every major Hollywood franchise today. We’re now almost fifty years beyond the release of Star Wars (1977)—that was long ago and in another galaxy. But even never-ending franchises eventually come to an end.

And what happens next?

At some point, dead genres can come back to life. But that’s a huge undertaking, and never a sure thing. (The western has never really recovered from what Hollywood did to it.) Under the best of circumstances, a cooling off period of 20-30 years is necessary before dead formulas can be revived in any meaningful way.

In the meantime, Hollywood needs to find something else. A good start would be telling fresh stories, instead of dumping new installments of formulaic franchises on a bored marketplace.