Meet the Replacements: Three Candidates for Hollywood’s Next Big Franchises
by Tom Burns

It keeps studio heads up at night, but the sad fact of Hollywood is that all good franchises must come to an end. Sure, there are a few exceptions, but even long-lasting series like the James Bond franchise need to be rebooted every couple of years to remain fresh, relevant, and, most importantly, profitable. It could be the law of diminishing returns or the fact that even the best concepts can be stretched too thin, but eventually, Freddy has to die, Rocky has to retire, the Death Star has to blow up, and Indy has to ride into the sunset. (We do realize the irony that all four of these franchises have reboots, revamps, spin-offs, and next chapters all currently in development. No one recycles quite like Hollywood.) And, when it gets to that point when a franchise begins to wind down, it's the job of studio executives, producers, screenwriters, and angry throngs of blogging masses to keep their eyes out for the next big franchise opportunity - the next piece of intellectual property that can be turned into a film franchise with limitless ancillary potential.

Being natural-born gamblers and speculators, we here at The Deadbolt have been looking at Hollywood's upcoming production slate and have identified three new movies that - if the prayers of their producers are answered - have the potential to not only become HUGE new players in the film franchise world, but also might just act as the replacements for three of the biggest film franchises of the past two decades. Here are our picks for the shameless, milk-them-till-they-drop franchises of tomorrow:

IS TWILIGHT THE NEW HARRY POTTER?

It's hard not to draw parallels between the media success of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, and that's exactly what Warner Brothers is counting on. While the WB is going to be suckling on the Hogwarts teet for years to come - we've got three more Harry Potter films, the Tales of Beedle the Bard spin-off book, and the now-under-construction Potter-Land amusement park down in Orlando coming down the pike - eventually, Rowling is going to need an heir apparent on the big screen. Hollywood has been trying out lots of pretenders to the throne lately (Golden Compass, Spiderwick Chronicles, Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, and others), but, more than any other recent Harry wannabe, Meyer's Twilight books seem to be tapping into that frenzied young adult fan base that made midnight Potter parties a worldwide phenomenon. The four books in the series - Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn - have all been best-sellers, and the first movie based on the Twilight series was just given WB's coveted Thanksgiving release date after they bumped Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince into 2009. (If that wasn't enough Potter/Twilight synergy for you, the male lead in Twilight, Robert Pattinson, played the hunky Cedric Diggory in the Goblet of Fire movie.)

Can Twilight be Warner Brothers' replacement for the winding-down Harry Potter franchise? It won't be easy. While the Potter books were all-ages fantasy romps (OK, the final books weren't exactly family-friendly), Meyer's novels are decidedly more focused on neo-gothic mystery and teenage romance - which, if we remember correctly from our childhoods, boys find icky. Will readers (and moviegoers) sympathize with vampires as much as they did with mostly benign witches and wizards? Can Meyer do for vampirism what Rowling did for magic? The characteristics of the reading fan bases might be the same, but the differences between Twilight and Harry Potter could be both a blessing and a curse for the WB. The blessing might be that the unique appeal of Twilight might tap into a whole new demographic for Warners. Movies like Step Up proved that teenage girls go to see movies en masse, and Twilight could be the first tween-girl supported mega-blockbuster since Titanic. The curse might be that trying to market the film as "the next Harry Potter" could alienate the legions of Potter fans and set up insanely high expectations for Meyer's first film adaptation. Twilight is definitely the best contender for the Potter crown we've seen so far, but it's going to take more than some emo vampires and lovelorn Hannah Montana fans to make the Twilight franchise soar.

IS SLEEPER THE NEXT JASON BOURNE?

Lots of heads turned in fanboy communities when it was announced in August that Tom Cruise and Sam Raimi were developing a big-screen adaptation of Ed Brubaker's cult favorite comic book Sleeper. Granted, Hollywood buying the film rights to a comic book is now a daily occurrence, but the idea of turning Sleeper into a Tom Cruise vehicle is both strangely compelling and potentially dangerous. For those unfamiliar, Sleeper follows an ex-spook named Holden Carver, who accidentally becomes bonded with an alien artifact that gives him strange abilities - most notably, the ability to not feel pain. Carver uses his newfound powers to assist him as he goes undercover in the powerful Tao crime syndicate, an assignment that has him constantly questioning his loyalties and where he stands in regards to the line between good and evil. The undercover aspects of Sleeper definitely have some parallels, thematically, to Scorsese's The Departed, but the character of Carver - a weary ex-spy with a penchant for kicking ass, stuck in the middle of a conflict between shadowy organizations - is pure Jason Bourne and, for that reason, we can definitely see why Raimi and Cruise were so interested in developing the property. In fact, being familiar with Sleeper, our biggest questions regarding the project are - how much do they need to change the character and general premise of Sleeper to work in the movie-world and are those changes a good thing or a bad thing?

In the "changes that need to be made" side, Sleeper, as a comic, is firmly set right in the middle of the Wildstorm comic book universe (a subsidiary of DC Comics). Many of the main characters in Sleeper - John Lynch, Grifter, etc. - are major, continuity-heavy figures in other Wildstorm books, so any Sleeper adaptation is either going to struggle with explaining those characters or will just have to recast them as more generic figures without the ties to their comic origins. On the "let's not change things too much" side, Sleeper became a big hit because of its complex story and densely plotted undercover action. However, the boiled down concept of the series - Jason Bourne with superpowers - might be so sexy and appealing to Hollywood filmmakers that they'll toss out all of the narrative complexity just to focus on the high-concept at the center of the story. (We've heard this is pretty much what happened during the development of Will Smith's Hancock.) We can understand Hollywood looking for another super-spy now that the Bourne franchise has come to a halt - honestly, what more about his past can Damon discover? - but Sleeper's superpowered super-spy could either be a worthy ass-kicking successor to Bourne or an embarrassing pseudo-superhero movie.

IS CABIN IN THE WOODS THE NEW SCREAM?

The fun part about talking about Joss Whedon's upcoming horror film, Cabin in the Woods, is that we know next to nothing about it. But the fact that we're so excited about it at all - even with our almost complete lack of details - is totally Joss' fault. When a guy with a reputation like Whedon's goes to the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con and tells the audience that he's written "the horror movie to end all horror movies... literally," he's just got to know that he's pouring ten-thousand gallons of gasoline on top of a huge fanboy fire. The project is currently in pre-production with a script by Whedon and Cloverfield writer (and long-time Joss collaborator) Drew Goddard, who is also set to direct the film. Goddard told MTV that, "It’s genius, it’s funny ... It’s got a harder and darker edge, but it’s also got classic Whedon qualities. It’ll rip your heart out and be heartfelt at the same time." He also went on to note: "There’s a reason the title is so straightforward. It’s its own sub-genre, the cabin in the woods, and this is sort of our take on it. It’s fresh and new."

So, with that bare minimum of details, where do we get off comparing the project to Scream? Here's our pitch - horror movies have become fairly generic lately, either falling into the trap of torture porn or going for uber-realism, even when their general premises are fairly silly. While that's OK for some, we really miss the era of the funny horror movies, the cool horror movies, the ironic horror movies - those great slasher flicks that knew how to play with our emotions like a violin, making us laugh one second and scream the next. Wes Craven's Scream holds an interesting place in the ironic horror genre. It's one of the the most successful examples of the genre, but the general lameness of its sequels were a major force in killing it. And while we dig Eli Roth and some of the other new horror mavens, we would LOVE to see someone revive the funny/ironic horror genre and, in our opinion, there's no one better than Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard. We're hoping (and we could be dead, dead wrong) that Cabin in the Woods will do exactly what the first Scream did - take the clichés and conventions of a creatively bankrupt genre and completely revitalize them for a new generation. For all we know, Cabin could just be Joss's long-secret attempt to make his own Saw movie (we doubt it), but so much of his other work is infused with such a potent blend of irony, humor, drama, and genuine emotion that we're really hoping that Cabin in the Woods will be the next big thing in the world of movie horror.