https://vo.rs/tags/franchise/Latest from the Franchise desk at vo.rs.Hugo -- gohugo.ioenThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Tue, 10 Oct 2023 13:00:00 +0000https://vo.rs/screen/the-universal-monsters-and-the-birth-of-the-franchise/<p>Everyone credits Marvel with inventing the shared universe — the recurring characters, the crossovers, the sense that every film is a chapter in one long serial you have to keep buying into. That credit is misplaced by about eighty years. Universal Pictures got there first, in black and white, on the strength of a flat-headed corpse and a Transylvanian count, and the machinery they assembled between 1931 and 1948 is the same machinery that runs Hollywood today. The monsters were almost incidental. What Carl Laemmle Jr.&rsquo;s studio really built was the assembly line, and once you see the mechanism you cannot unsee it in every franchise since.</p>Tue, 10 Oct 2023 13:00:00 +0000