“For your future enjoyment”: managing intellectual property through franchise refurbishment

Abstract

This article is interested in the ways franchises are managed through the retelling or expansion of the stories within them. Using Disney’s recent live-action versions of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast as a case study, I outline the industrial utility of franchised textual expansion, arguing that many reboots and sequels and other modes of franchised proliferation serve to facilitate a process of franchise refurbishment – or an instance of rebranding and intellectual property upkeep. Specifically, I consider the way Disney has used live-action versions of their classic animated princess narratives to assuage culturally outdated gender politics often associated with these valuable pieces of intellectual property. Ultimately, I argue that refurbishment is both a textual and an industrial process – or a set of processes – that has evolved alongside the logics of modern media franchising to aid in the long-term management of intellectual properties.