Torch the Franchise and Run

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A writer has created a franchise, but he doesn't own the legal rights to what will happen to the franchise, the publisher/network/studio/whatever does. Or maybe he shares the rights with someone else and just doesn't have as much control as he likes. He wants to stop writing it and move on to something else.

But he doesn't want anyone else being able to handle his property, even though he doesn't legally own it—and even if he did own the franchise, what happens when his kids get their hands on the franchise after his inevitable Author Existence Failure? The solution? Torch the Franchise and Run. Write one last story that totally wrecks everything. He kills off everyone he possibly can. He makes the lives of all of the characters a living hell before executing them. He makes 100% sure that everyone (or at least most of the cast) is dead, and those that aren't have no way of returning to the status quo or main premise of the show.

Essentially the authorial version of breaking your own toys so that nobody else can play with them.

See also: Kill'Em All, though this is done less for the story and more for the personal or legal satisfaction of the author. Related to Writer Revolt. When this happens in a physical sense, you get Trash the Set.

Fan backlash can cause this to backfire in the most unpleasant ways, even before there was an Internet to inspire an Internet Backdraft. May force the author to use an Author's Saving Throw if the new franchise he attempts to start sinks like a stone - either because it didn't have the same spark as the old series or his old audience is so angry at him they refuse to follow him.

As many of these examples show, this isn't guaranteed to succeed even in its main goal of ending the franchise, never mind the fan reaction. If the publishers want to keep the franchise going badly enough, they'll find a way, whether that's making Prequels, finding a way to press the Reset Button, or, if push comes to shove, retconning the entire Downer Ending and restarting from an earlier point.

Examples of Torch the Franchise and Run include:

Anime and Manga

  • One reason for Yoshiyuki Tomino's Kill'Em All tendencies was a desire to avoid making sequels. It didn't stop one of his shows from becoming one of the biggest franchises in all of anime.
    • His most infamous case of this happening was with Mobile Suit Victory Gundam, which, legend says, he wrote deliberately to try to kill off Gundam for good. Didn't stop them from making more.
    • Interestingly, Tomino admitted that he regretted pulling this off when he wrote the novel trilogy of said series, noting that if he knew it was going to be that big, he wouldn't have done it.
  • Master of Martial Hearts ended its last episode with a huge Take That towards its viewers, anime in general, and especially panty fighter series. It wasn't exactly the highest-quality production in the first place, but still.
  • Mahou Sensei Negima received an extremely abrupt Distant Finale ending that had many fans puzzled as to the remaining unresolved plot threads. A short time later it surfaced that Akamatsu had decided to end the series as a protest against his publisher Kodansha for their attempts to take away all the rights to the work, including the copyright itself. Nobody is killed off, however, the story goes out of its way to make any sort of continuation completely impossible. The Big Bad is dealt with offscreen somehow and the romance is left ambiguous apart from Ship Sinking for the four most popular pairings for the main character.
  • And it's not the first time Kodansha tried to do so. Gunnm: Last Order nearly ended not even close to its conclusion due to copyright dispute between Kodansha and Yukito Kishiro. Luckily, Kishiro managed to retain his copyright and moved to Shueisha, continuing the story.
  • Harenchi Gakuen, the first series written by Go Nagai, ended this way because of the Moral Guardians coming down hard on the magazine that published it. It may explain why Nagai has done his own publishing for most of his career, as well as why many of his works have a Downer Ending.

Comic Books

  • Grant Morrison ended his run on the comic book Doom Patrol by pretty much torching the place down. The leader turned out to be evil, some characters died, others were permanently exiled to another dimension. The writer who took over only had one or two characters to work with.
    • This is not without precedent, however: the first version of the Doom Patrol ended with all the main characters dying. The version that came before Morrison's version ended with some of the cast dying and one of them in a coma. Interestingly, Morrison's version (which was one of the most popular) ended with only two characters dead and the rest walking away into the sunset.
    • Interestingly, when his run on the much-higher-profile Justice League of America ended, he only wrote out the characters he'd introduced during his run, leaving the same core 'Big Seven' team he started with, and essentially handing the next writer a blank slate. And the only character who died was one Morrison himself had created, since the character's own comic was cancelled before it had a chance to end properly.
  • The X-Men spin-off X-Statix creator Peter Milligan did this in the book's final issue. This being superhero comics, it didn't stop him from revisiting the characters for a miniseries.
  • Peter David left his original run as writer on The Incredible Hulk under unpleasant circumstances. So he killed off Betty Banner in a sudden, horrific, ironically tragic, yet not really logical way (she'd been married to Bruce for years. Why did she suddenly wake up covered with radiation burns one morning?), and then made his last issue an alternate future issue set many years in the future, tying off all the comic's loose ends and giving everyone a very sad but definitive ending. Paul Jenkins, the next major Hulk writer, and most of the fandom treated most of David's last issue as a What If story (though Betty stayed dead for a few years).
  • In 1990, after getting a deal with DC, Alan Grant killed off Johnny Alpha, the protagonist of Strontium Dog, to prevent any new writers from messing with him. A few years later, John Wagner started writing prequels, and recently brought Johnny Back from the Dead, to the disgust of the fanbase.
  • Novas Aventuras de Mega Man was almost less Torch the Franchise and Run and more Torch The Franchise And Take Over. One of the writers created the character Princess in an attempt to kill everyone there and use it to make it her own series. Thankfully, someone caught him before it could happen and Princess was Put on a Bus.
  • Alan Moore may or may not have wanted to prevent anyone else from using the characters from Watchmen, but its bleak ending and thorough Deconstruction of the superhero genre certainly had that effect all the same. This is the reason why the story uses expies of the Charlton Comics superheroes: Moore was initially hired to write a story using the Charlton characters themselves, but DC executives looked at his first draft and realized that if they published the story they'd never be able to use the characters again. They asked him to either change the story or change the superheroes, and he changed the superheroes. Watchmen remained a standalone miniseries for over 20 years—and when DC finally did decide to make more stories in that 'verse, they commissioned the new writers to create prequels instead of attempting to continue from where Watchmen ended. This did not, however, prevent DC from doing a sequel eventually, which came in 2016 with Doomsday Clock.
  • And Allan Heinberg did this to the Young Avengers in Avengers: Children's Crusade 9. But only by splitting them up so if a writer really wanted to they could bring them back together.
  • In Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, fantasy writer Ezra Hound attempts to kill off his hero, Bow-Zar the Barkbarian, so he can write serious fiction. Bow-Zar, in turn, time travels to the present and attempts to kill off Ezra Hound.

Film

  • The Alpha-Omega bomb in the second Planet of the Apes movie. Didn't work, as they used Time Travel to continue afterward.
  • After losing a lawsuit with some of the people Ian Fleming collaborated with on a (then) failed James Bond screenplay called Thunderball the executive producers killed off SPECTRE's leader Blofeld [1] in For Your Eyes Only just to stick it to Kevin McClory (who prevented Blofeld from being the villain of The Spy Who Loved Me, and later revisited the story he still held the rights to in Never Say Never Again).
    • To casual observers, the ending of No Time To Die (in which Felix Leiter dies, Blofeld and all of SPECTRE's leadership dies, and even Bond himself dies in a Heroic Sacrifice) would appear to be this if not for the usual "James Bond will return" message in the credits. This message lets us know that it's only an ending for the Daniel Craig version of the franchise that began with Casino Royale, and not the end of the James Bond movie franchise as a whole.

Literature

  • L. Frank Baum was caught in a situation like this. He desperately wanted to stop writing stories about the Land of Oz, but his publisher and fans wouldn't let him. He had established that nothing dies in the land of Oz, so he couldn't kill anyone off. In the sixth book, he tried to use the Literary Agent Hypothesis to justify never writing a single thing about Oz again because an invasion caused Oz to become isolationist and totally cut off all contact with the outside world, thus promising to never ever write another story about Oz ever again. When his other books failed to sell as well, he had to begin writing stories about Oz again to pay his bills, backpedaling and explaining that they discovered the radio in Oz that Dorothy could use to broadcast Baum news about Oz.
  • Michael Crichton has attempted to do this twice to the Jurassic Park franchise, to no avail. The first book ends with the fictional air force of Costa Rica, famous for totally abolishing its military in 1948, destroying the island and killing all the dinosaurs - at that time, there was no franchise to speak of, and Crichton didn't intend for Jurassic Park to become one. Then, in The Lost World (which Crichton was pressured into writing so a sequel to the Jurassic Park film adaptation could be made), the novel ends by noting that all the dinosaurs on Site B will shortly die off due to a spreading prion infection. Despite this, a third Jurassic Park film was made without basis on any novel - not that the films had much to do with them as it was - and had no involvement from Crichton. It can be argued that Crichton's death in 2008 should have been the end of it; however, a fourth Jurassic Park film, titled Jurassic World, was released in 2015, with more sequels following in later years. Despite his genius and wits, poor Michael Crichton was no match for Hollywood greed.
  • Andre Norton shut down the Witch World series in a somewhat similar manner. The last Witch World novel has every single character from the series traveling all over the world to shut down all the Gates so that no one and nothing can come through from Outside again, ever. So far it has stuck.
  • One of the earliest examples is Sherlock Holmes' original death. Also backfired.
  • In-fiction example: In Stephen King's Misery, the author/main character kills off his ongoing romance character and then is forced to resurrect her by a demented fan (the Kathy Bates character in the movie).
  • There was a post-apocalyptic pulp-novel series called The Last Ranger. In the final novel they blew up the Earth.
  • Done in-universe in Hyperion: the poet Martin Silenus, finally realizing that his profitable The Dying Earth series of books[2] has become a brain-dead Cliché Storm, decides to just kill the thing off, completely and utterly, so that he can go and search for his "muse", so he can work on real poetry.
  • This is why the title character regains his sanity and dies at the end of Don Quixote. After publishing what became Part One, Cervantes was dismayed to see other writers producing unauthorized Quixote stories of their own, so he wrote Part Two as he did to give the character a definite ending.
  • Similarly, Agatha Christie killed off Hercule Poirot in Curtain to give the character a definite ending and prevent other writers from writing more books with him after her death. She actually wrote Curtain during World War II, worried about the possibility of being killed in the London Blitz, but as she wasn't, she continued writing for several decades, and Curtain was not published until a few months before her death in 1976.
  • Larry Niven's Known Space nearly had one of its own. At one point in his career, Niven had decided there wasn't much left to say in that particular universe, and asked a friend what he should do with it. His friend suggested writing a story that basically destroys the entire thing (Niven never asked why, saying he and his friend think alike). This story, "Down in Flames", was outlined but abandoned when Niven read about Dyson Spheres and was inspired to write Ringworld. "Ringworld" and "Down in Flames" use mutually opposing assumptions about canon (DiF assumes the Core Explosion was a hoax and a Tnuctipun conspiracy, Ringworld accepts the Core Explosion happened and that the Tnuctipun have been dead for a billion years as early stories said), making it impossible to use "Down in Flames" and keeping the 'verse alive.
  • The last The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book ended with every version of Earth in the Multiverse being destroyed, and almost all of the regular characters dying. Oddly enough, creator Douglas Adams did intend to make a new book undoing the damage, but died before he could write it.
    • Eventually, Eoin Colfer was contracted to write his own continuation.
  • The Witcher gets killed with a pitchfork in the last book of the Saga. Then, the video game comes out with a Cosmic Retcon. When the author threatens to introduce another Cosmic Retcon of his own with a new book he's writing[when?], disregarding the video game continuity. The fandom ain't rejoicing.
    • However, in an interview from the Enhanced Edition of the game, Andrzej Sapkowski explains that he is fine with them existing, and he does view them as valid stories in the continuity.

Live-Action TV

  • Television series La Femme Nikita, final season - Retcon of key points from previous seasons, Everybody Dies, etc.
  • Xena: Warrior Princess — Final season and a half—most of the supporting cast including most of the Greek gods killed off in anticlimactic ways or changed beyond recognition, Xena and Gabrielle being forced to sleep for 25 years, and eventually a Redemption Equals Death final episode.
  • Terry Nation tried this with the end of Season 3 of Blake's 7. He torched the Liberator, revealed the "Blake" they found to be a hallucination, stranded the crew on the rear end of the galaxy, etc. That didn't work. Undeterred, script editor Chris Boucher made damn sure to try harder torching the replacement ship, and all the cast at the end of the following season! This time, it worked.
  • Of all places, Little House On the Prairie ended with the entire town being dynamited, though the cast was spared.
  • Jim Henson's Dinosaurs ended the world in the very last episode, so that revivals couldn't happen.
  • Russell T. Davies' Torchwood: Children of Earth looked like this to many viewers, but turned out not to be. The fandom is still discussing if it was a good thing or not.
  • The end of Six Feet Under doesn't preclude a revival so much as make it entirely redundant.
  • This is how Richard Castle of Castle ended his Derrick Storm novels so he could begin the new Nikki Heat series. He gets quite a bit of flack for it until the Heat books take off.
  • The end of The Good Place has the main protagonists setting up a new system in the afterlife to allow everyone to be tested in the Medium Place so that they can avoid the Bad Place and have a better chance of eventually reaching the real Good Place. After reaching the Good Place themselves they spend billions of 'bearamies' (a bizarre nonsensical way of time measurement in the afterlife) there. Eventually, three of the six main characters (Jason, Chidi, and Eleanor) choose to leave the Good Place and walk through The Door -- a special door where those who go through it disappear into the universe/surrender to the universe/become one with everything ... something like that. No one really knows exactly what happens, not even Janet (the 'not a girl/not a robot' afterlife guide/assistant who's been supplying everyone with all sorts of useful information since the start of the series). Since The Door and beyond is clearly meant to be a substitute for the real afterlife which no one really knows anything about, a direct continuation past this point would be missing the point entirely.

Newspaper Comics

  • John Darling was a comic strip spin-off from Funky Winkerbean by Tom Batiuk that ran about 12 years. Batiuk and his syndicate came into conflict over the rights so Batiuk killed off the title character and ended the strip, leaving the syndicate with a worthless property. Years later, Batiuk revisited the story in FW to solve the murder. Later still, introduced Darling's daughter, Jessica, as part of the FW cast.
  • According to an Urban Legend, Jim Davis of Garfield fame ended his first comic strip, Gnorm Gnat, when he got bored with it by having Gnorm stomped by a giant foot. In reality, Gnorm ended with a simple "Merry Christmas" strip at the end of 1975. Brian Cronin discusses and debunks this urban legend in one of his Comic Book Urban Legends revealed columns.

Video Games

  • Debatably done with the MOTHER video game series. Itoi wanted the series to end with Mother 3, so he destroyed what little else remained of the entire world, and failed to answer the question of how the characters survived that - but they all personally insist to the player that they survived and they're happy. Somehow. Itoi said that the original script for the game was even darker, so the original ending was probably meant to Kill'Em All.
  • Hideo Kojima was reportedly tired of the Metal Gear series after Metal Gear Solid, but nowhere does it show more than in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Practically every named character is killed off, including series mainstay Ocelot, and Solid Snake is left with six months to live. This did not stop Konami from announcing a prequel and a post-MGS4 spin-off.
  • Ed Boon wanted Mortal Kombat: Armageddon to do this to Mortal Kombat so that he can easily reboot the series with a new cast by bringing upon the apocalyptic Battle of Armageddon, a legendary conflict that promises The End of the World as We Know It. When this plan fell through, he proceeded differently: Mortal Kombat 9 does show that Armageddon has ruined the world... only for a dying Raiden to invoke a different kind of reboot. Which, to everyone's surprise, involved killing nearly everyone. Huh.
  • Logan's Shadow seems to have done this for the Syphon Filter series, with the possible deaths of several main characters and no plans for further sequels.
    • Not necessarily, there's rumors of a direct sequel coming to the Play Station 3 in 2012.
  • Alan Wake has an in-universe example, where the titular author is planning to end his popular mystery series by killing off the main character.
  • In what turned out to be a subversion but looked otherwise for the longest time, the plot of Star Ocean 3 has its infamous twist - that the universe is a giant MMORPG and you wind up killing its creator - which seemed to be an attempt to end the series from a narrative standpoint. Since then, three more games have been made, with one even including a possible way around the third game twist: the creators apparently didn't actually plan on ending the series, and realized they wrote themselves into a corner trying to set plots after the third game, hence why all the games since have been prequels.

Web Comics

Web Original

  • In "The Day the Music Died" by Sam Starbuck, a short story about everything possible going wrong with a Harry Potter-like fandom at once, this is one of the things that goes wrong. The author—who's writing the last novel of a series while on his deathbed—decides to finish with an apocalypse to prevent anyone from writing any sequels after his death.
  • A variant happens in one tandem writing assignment discussed on Snopes: Rebecca, disliking her partner Gary's attempt to derail the story she was writing into a science fiction action story by killing off the male lead and attempting to write him into a corner by having Congress end the war with Skylon 4 and outlaw war and space travel. He then managed to get around this by having another alien faction attack, killing the female lead and causing the president to decide to veto the treaty. Rebecca then gave up in disgust.
  • Encyclopedia Dramatica's founder "Girlvinyl" (Sherrod Ellen DeGrippo) torched the franchise in April 2011 by shutting down encyclopediadramatica.com and redirecting the domain to a new project, Oh Internet!, which was (in the words of one ED user) "basically a carbon copy of Know Your Meme" and which was an immediate flop. There have been various attempts by users to relaunch the original using some other top-level domain (.ch, .se, .es and .rs have all been used at various times) but, as of 2020, the project is defunct.

Western Animation

  • The final episode of Harvey Birdman has the eponymous character being killed-off in a rather anti-climatic way. However, there was a Sequel Hook just in case they want to return to it He has a clone somewhere out there.
  • The DC Animated Movie Universe, which began with Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, continued with Justice League: War and 14 other animated films, came to an abrupt end with Justice League Dark: Apokolips War, which saw several of the heroes killed violently, some in ways more gruesome than others (the luckiest among them had speaking roles), and others horribly mutilated or scarred or turned into cyborgs by Darkseid and his forces. In the end, the heroes manage to defeat Darkseid, Trigon, and the Apokolips forces, but thousands are dead, and the Earth is damaged beyond repair due to Darkseid's forces stealing magma from the Earth's core. While some of the surviving heroes desperately try to come up with ways to delay the Earth's inevitable destruction, John Constantine persuades the Flash to create another Flashpoint, which would likely end the entire reality that began with Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox. The movie ends with the DC Animated Movie Universe reality being whited out.
  1. ↑ or at least, an unnamed character widely presumed to be Blofeld
  2. ↑ Yes, the title is a tribute to Jack Vance. Now have a cookie.
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