Let's face it: franchises rule the box office. Let's take a look at some of the big franchises, both current and anticipated, and get a good sense of where this is all headed. There's more peril than promise, I fear.

First, let's look at Harry Potter, the quintessential film franchise. One movie per book, with seven b—no, wait, they split Deathly Hallows to keep the die-hards happy, so eight movies.

Still, that's pretty good, right? They didn't split Goblet of Fire like they were going to; we could have had nine or ten movies.

Yes, and now executives are kicking themselves silly not to cash in when they had even more opportunity. We're gonna start having to call this thing The Franchise That Lived, because they're turning the companion volume Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them into a trilogy. If they keep at this record for all of Rowling's remaining Potterverse material, increasing the number of installments like an unhinged Fibonacci series, we won't be done with these films for a while yet.

Moving on to a similar, yet more hotly anticipated series: Star Wars. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone more excited about The Force Awakens than I am, but I'm beginning to have unsettling feelings about where the franchise is headed. We all know that the sequels will make tons of money regardless of their quality (although at this rate I would find it unlikely that J.J. & Co. would find a way to make them worse than the prequels).

The Force Awakens and the two subsequent installments in the sequel trilogy will happen and I'm not concerned about them, Rogue One looks promising, and heck, I even have a feeling that the two other spin-off films will be at least halfway decent. But Disney put big money into Lucasfilm and I have a feeling that they're going to want to make more than just six films. The best way to handle the franchise is to have the stars of the sequel trilogy do what the original trilogy actors are doing in the sequels, but I have a feeling that Disney's not going to want to wait that long, which means a sequel trilogy to the sequel trilogy and/or further populating the universe with more spin-offs, and keeping up quality there is going to be extremely difficult.

A similar case is that of the Lord of the Rings movies. Peter Jackson's acclaimed interpretations of the Tolkien classics, nominated for basically every award possible and winning most of them, remain widely acclaimed. When they announced the Hobbit films, I thought of it as a logical move ... until they went from two movies to three. It took three movies to tell three books, and all of the sudden you've got to fill up two hours with a third of the material? Of course you're going to have pacing issues—ones that even the greatest filmmakers would be hard-pressed to solve. I give it five years before a tetralogy based on The Silmarillion is announced.

Okay, I think I get it. But these series are either finishing up or are yet to start and what you're suggesting hasn't actually happened yet.

Well, yeah, none of these are currently disasters, and I have reason to believe that studios will continue to make incredible amounts of money by doing nothing but simply funding these franchises. The success or failure of these series will be less at the box office and more in the minds of those who see them. I mean, no one likes Michael Bay's Transformers series, but they have lots of explosions and continue to make money even if the franchise is a train wreck—or, given that it's Michael Bay, a triple train wreck where each train was carrying a third of the US nuclear arsenal.

I have but two more examples of current large franchises, so bear with me.

The Fast and Furious franchise has seven installments, with the seventh intended to launch a trilogy. After the death of Paul Walker, the filmmakers decided to make #7 a real fitting end to the series and a touching send-off to Walker, which would have been a nice thing to do ... except for the fact that they're still making #8 and #9 and they more or less messed themselves up by changing #7. This is actually real problem for the Fast and Furious team, and I have a feeling that they'll end up starting a trilogy on #8 and having it run through to #10. Just getting #8 to seem plausible and not a tacky money grab is going to be an uphill battle.

Finally, the big daddy of current franchises: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It grows bigger by the day, and Marvel's original plan outlined three phases of epic proportions, not to mention Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Carter, Daredevil, and future shows. This is the biggest universe in terms of sheer scale and it has a ton of moving parts without much in common between films—well, except for the ever-present Stan Lee cameo. (Even the actors change; Edward Norton was the Hulk in a film people seem not to remember.)

Marvel has the best chance of pulling off something like this, but it wouldn't take much for the MCU to become a self-contradictory jumble. Acclaimed writer and disruptive pseudo-feminist Joss Whedon's comments about what he did and did not consider to be a part of the MCU may be as much of an indictment against the MCU's current size and scope as it is against Whedon himself.

So you're saying that there's a critical mass for a franchise?

Yes, with the caveat that they all exist in the same universe. James Bond is a very long series, but only recently have the films been definitively set in the same universe (although I committed quite a long entry to this blog awhile back postulating that James Bond is a Time Lord). Even then, it's doubtful that the Casino Royale/Quantum of Solace universe is the same as the Skyfall/Spectre universe. Bond's got a while to go before he runs out, and the nature of the role means that the series will reboot again when Daniel Craig makes his exit.

But TV shows don't have this issue—look at Doctor Who.

... a show that has decidedly gone downhill under Moffat.

Still, TV shows are different from movies in many fashions. Shows usually translate well into films (see Mission: Impossible), but I can't think of any adaptations that successfully went in the opposite direction.

Shows have a slower pace, more hours to tell a story, and deeper characterization. We have the opportunity to get to know Andy Dwyer that we couldn't possibly get for Star-Lord, and that's just an example from one actor. There's a smaller group of people who make a show from season to season, and they can plan what they want, who they want, and when they want things to happen.

Movies also must feel complete, and continuing to find compelling ways to tell stories with characters, both familiar and unfamiliar, while simultaneously keeping in mind that each installment must come to its own conclusion (to ensure that the films within a franchise are enjoyable by themselves), will eventually cause problems.

In short, I don't think that all of these franchises I mentioned are necessarily doomed to failure, and certainly I doubt that any of their respective installments will flop at the box office. With each successive film, however, you run the risk of painting yourself into a corner by being forced to tell new and compelling stories while maintaining self-consistency in everything from aesthetic to characterization. It's an elaborate dance, and one misstep means fandom chaos.