How a Story Ages Well
The importance of remembering your audience grows up
We all have our classics, the books we read as little kids, our teenage book stash, the first movie we watched alone. The entertainment industry is well aware of these nostalgic memories and uses it to create adaptation and remakes, but they sometimes forget the most important thing — the audience grows up as well.
Franchises can be split into two schools of thought: On the one hand stand those who keep each story as it’s own, working on attracting new audiences of the targeted age. On the other hand stand those who see the fandom as the recurring customers, those you wish to keep as long as the franchise is alive.
Let’s dive in into these two opposing approaches, starting with the most known long-lasting show: Pokemon.
One thing every pokemon fan knows is that Ash Ketchum never grows up. This decision is probably planned, keeping the targeted audience focused on young children. As so, the theme and main characters are the same (Ash tries to win a championship in a new region), but the specifics change with the times. It’s enough to look at the evolution of the seasons’ professors, or the introduction of diverse trainers in the games, to see the newer versions are not the same as the first.
Another known representative is Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl Franchise. Like most writers, Eoin sticks with YA content, even when the last book of the series was published 12 years after the first. The series is meant to be immortal and a recommendation for children throughout time, cashing over the first books over and over. Whether or not it succeeded is yet to be seen.
On the side, stands one of the best time-aware adaptations I have yet to see — The Harry Potter franchise.
Harry Potter films franchise is a great example of how a single creator (David Heyman & Steve Kloves) adapts a single epic story throughout time. The films were published between 2001–2011, a 10-year gap almost enough to graduate. The producers were well aware of it, the first three films were rated PG, while the rest were PG-13 with an increasing number of rating components (death, violence, sexuality and so on). The content gets darker and more mature as Harry (and the audience) grow up, resulting in a great cult film series, that still attract new viewers today.
Another good adaptation example is The Mortal Instrument’s TV show: Shadowhunters. The first book was published in 2007, and the show’s first episode was aired on 2016. A typical young adult fan of the books will be in his 20s when the show is released. The show knows it, and it features New Adult versions of the book’s heroes. Ageing their cast and their content shifted it from YA to NA, and that hit exactly where the majority of the fandom is.
Best of both worlds
Looking at the two options, the question of which is better pops up. But the simple answer is none. Each has its pros and cons, his strategy and his target audience. The best solution is actually to combine both approaches, but it’s important not to stick with one side’s strategy but aim for the other’s audience.
If we look back at Pokemon and Artemis Fowl. Both tried to attract their old fandom in recently created films: Detective Pikachu (2019) and Artemis Fowl (2020). While the first was a huge success, the latter failed miserably. The difference was in how they treated the fandom: Detective Pikachu was not a children’s film. It showed a more mature world of pokemons, how they interact in the daily routine of adults, focusing directly on the adults who know pokemon from their youth. Artemis Fowl also tried to have more adult content, focusing more on authorities’ corruption, but it still didn’t go all the way through and kept the content more juvenile. It resulted in a hybrid that doesn’t live up to their older fandom, and not loved enough by young new viewers.
There is no doubt that franchises have power. A successful one is appealing, leads to more successes and produces more profit, but it also has a strong glamour that can sometimes blind. The important thing is to always remember who your audience is. A single unit of the franchise can wither build on the fandom’s support or ignore them and attract others. The nice thing with a franchise is that you don’t need to hold both sides of the stick, just make two sticks instead — the fandom is there to have your back.
