Franchise Origins Across Media

The trail begins in the medium where the fewest series-franchise entries here started: prose. C. S. Lewis published the seven Chronicles of Narnia novels between 1950 and 1956, and Disney and Walden Media did not bring the first screen adaptation, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, until 2005, a gap of more than half a century between the book series starting and the franchise becoming a media franchise at all.

Tolkien's three-volume novel, published in 1954 and 1955 as a sequel to The Hobbit, waited even longer for its defining screen version: Peter Jackson's film trilogy did not arrive until 2001 to 2003, when it won a combined seventeen Academy Awards including Best Picture for The Return of the King.

J. K. Rowling's seven novels, published between 1997 and 2007, moved to the screen far faster than Tolkien's or Lewis's, with Warner Bros. releasing an eight-film series between 2001 and 2011 that largely kept the same core cast across the entire decade of production.

Suzanne Collins's dystopian trilogy, published 2008 to 2010, shows the literature to film gap closing further still: Lionsgate's first film adaptation reached theaters in 2012, only four years after the first novel, and Collins has since written two prequel novels that were adapted for film in turn.

The trail turns from novels to the medium where series-franchise originals most often begin: the movie screen itself. George Lucas's Star Wars opened in 1977 and its films alone have since grossed more than 10 billion dollars, the point where a single film first grew into a franchise spanning television, novels, comics and games.

Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien began as a stand alone science fiction horror picture, and it was James Cameron's 1986 sequel Aliens that reframed the series as action horror, the template these film-originated franchises repeat of a single successful film only later becoming a series.

Indiana Jones began the same way, as a single film: Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, styled by George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg as a deliberate tribute to 1930s and 1940s adventure serials, before the character carried the franchise across four more films and more than four decades.

The Wachowskis' The Matrix opened in 1999 as a single film whose bullet time visual effect, freezing the camera's motion around frozen action, became one of the most imitated techniques of its era before two sequels arrived together in 2003 and a fourth film followed in 2021.

The trail moves from cinema to broadcast television, where Doctor Who has run on the BBC since 1963, using a device unique among these franchises, the Doctor's on screen regeneration into a new actor and personality, to keep one television series continuously recastable across more than sixty years.

Star Trek began on television in 1966 as a series that was canceled after three seasons before finding a large audience in syndicated reruns, and it was those reruns that actually grew it into the film and streaming franchise of thirteen movies and several further television series that followed.

The Simpsons started even smaller than a canceled series: animated shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987, two years before Fox gave the Simpson family their own half hour series in 1989, which has since become the longest running American scripted primetime series on record.

The trail turns to the console, where Mario first appeared not in his own game at all but as the player character of the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong, four years before Super Mario Bros. in 1985 gave him the platform series that made him a franchise in his own right.

The Legend of Zelda began the following year, in 1986, and its open world exploration and puzzle solving design was influential enough on its own terms that Ocarina of Time, released in 1998, is still widely cited among the greatest video games ever made.

Pokemon Red and Green launched on the Game Boy in 1996, and by combined revenue across games, cards, anime and merchandise the franchise they founded is generally regarded as the highest grossing media franchise in the world, with total revenue estimated above 100 billion dollars.

The trail ends in manga and anime, the medium behind three of this atlas's series-franchise types on their own. Dragon Ball began as a manga serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump starting in 1984, and its anime adaptation Dragon Ball Z is widely credited with introducing many Western audiences to anime during its television syndication in the 1990s and 2000s.

Naruto followed as a Weekly Shonen Jump manga beginning in 1999, running to 72 collected volumes and more than 700 combined episodes across its two anime series, before a manga sequel, Boruto, continued the story through Naruto's own son.

Attack on Titan, serialized from 2009 to 2021, closes the trail as the most recent of these seventeen starting points, and unlike every other stop on this path its story has actually concluded, its anime adaptation finishing across two studios, Wit Studio and MAPPA, in 2023.