The Danger of Misusing Franchises

Especially Disney, a huge company on the entertainment market, has proven in recent years that while they can buy successful franchises (or the movie rights to successful IPs), they often can’t use them in a way that pleases the fans. I wrote a whole blog post about Disney and Star Wars recently, so I’m not going to go back into that now. Instead, we’ll be talking about the disaster that was Disney’s “Artemis Fowl” movie as an example. We’re also going to talk about why it is so dangerous for companies to misuse or mishandle a franchise they’ve bought the rights to.

First, I’d like to start with a short description of the Artemis Fowl series, as written by Eoin Colfer, just so we’re all on the same page. The series started in 2001 with the publishing of the first novel, simply titled “Artemis Fowl”.
From the very start, the novelty aspect of the series was presented: the character it was named for and who was definitely the protagonist, too, was both a preteen (he’s eleven in the first novel) and a full-fledged, competent criminal mastermind. Artemis is the villain in the first book (and slowly becomes a hero over time). That was interesting enough to draw people into the story and it made coming back to later books (although I think that book six and seven are a bit redundant — you can jump from five to eight, the last book, without really missing out) more likely for them as well.
There are quite some other well-realised characters in the books (and some less well-realised ones, too). For a book aimed at preteens and teens, it’s very good. Even as an adult, I’ve found reading the books entertaining and Artemis especially held up to scrutiny for me.
So, for short: Artemis is a criminal mastermind who has found out that fairies are real and is now making use of that to fill his own pockets. There’s a lot more to the first book and you might want to read it, but that’s what you essentially need to know to understand the story’s novelty.

Now for the Disney movie. When the casting decisions went public, quite some fans were already negatively surprised because two characters especially, Butler and Holly Short, were clearly cast well against their description in the book. When the first trailer was released, the fans were completely annoyed because it was all-too-obvious that this had little, if anything, to do with their beloved characters.
What about the casting, then?
Well, in the novels, Holly Short, an elf with the Lower Elements Police who meets with Artemis more than once, is several times clearly described as having nut-brown skin, brown hair, and hazel eyes. Now, fairies probably don’t have the same take on ethnicity as humans do and there’s no suggestion that Holly is considered a fairy of colour with all that includes, but the fact remains that an actress playing her should be a woman of colour. Instead, her actress is a fair-skinned, fair-haired Irish girl.
With Butler, the opposite is true. At several points in the series, Butler pretends to be a close relative of his charge (as he’s Artemis’ butler and bodyguard) — a father or an uncle. That wouldn’t work (especially with father/son) if they didn’t at least share a general colouring. Butler is described as shaving his head, but his brows are still dark and his eyes are blue — a similar blue to Artemis’ who is also described as black-haired in addition to being very pale (as he’s rarely out and about). There are suggestions (such as his given name Domovoi) that Butler might be Slavic in looks and his younger sister Juliet is described as blond-haired and blue-eyed as well. The Butler clan doesn’t seem to have African roots. In addition, they’ve been serving the Fowl clan since the fifteenth century, which would leave a bad taste if they were of African descent. Yet, both Butler and Juliet have been cast as black.
Then there’s the gender-switch for Commander Root. In the novels, Julius Root is the stereotypical rough superior who pushes his team to be the best they can be. He’s called ‘Beetroot’ by the officers under his command for his tendency to get angry quickly, too. Casting Root as a woman invalidates Holly Short’s arc in the first book, which is that she is the first female member of the recon unit — a ‘test case’ who will decide whether other female officers will be able to join later. With the commander of the recon unit being a woman, Holly clearly is no longer the first. In addition, the gender-switched casting doesn’t add to the story at all.

Yet, the more problematic change made for the movie was to make Artemis not a criminal mastermind any longer. Artemis is a nice guy in this one who is in no way, shape, or form different from other ‘preteen fantasy movie leads’ out there.
He’s also quite sporty and physical, which is the complete opposite of Book Artemis — several times throughout the series, Artemis is in considerable danger because he’s not a physical person and Butler is elsewhere and can’t help him. If Book Artemis tried to surf, he’d drown — but he wouldn’t go surfing in the first place, so it’s fine.
The big novelty of the Artemis Fowl series, as mentioned, was that Artemis was a competent criminal mastermind as early as eleven years old. That he could take over the crime empire of the family when his father went missing even earlier. That he is, without a speck of doubt, the villain in the first novel, yet he gets away with it. The first book establishes how criminal and villainous he is so the following books can slowly lead him towards a more heroic approach. Imagine how shocked the fans were to find him a nice, normal boy who will first have to learn to be a villain.
Then there’s the fact that Artemis’ mother Angeline is dead in the movie (she’s a major influence on his morals in the books) and his father is still around (to get kidnapped, something which doesn’t happen in the first novel) and knows that fairies exist. What is it with Disney and dead mothers, really?

With all of those changes made, the first and the second book squeezed together into one movie which did no services to either of the books, and with other strange choices (like casting children as most background fairies in the movie to save on computer effects), the movie wasn’t popular with the fans. For everyone else, it came down to being a pretty average urban fantasy movie aimed at preteens and teens, which also didn’t make it something everyone wanted to see.
That is the biggest danger for everyone who tries to adapt someone else’s intellectual property — if you do not understand what you are working with, you’re likely to do something which completely goes again established characteristics, traits, or canon in general. Disney fell into that trap with the Star Wars franchise and, clearly, also with Artemis Fowl. It seems as if they don’t even go far enough as to have someone read and summarise the books or watch all of the movies at least. Not to mention that they don’t seem to have anyone on the board which makes the decisions who is an outright fan…

The lesson to be learned from this, I imagine, is that you should take the time to understand a franchise before you work with it. What comes natural to writers of fan-fiction should also be common sense to people who want to profit from the fans of a franchise. If you want to pull in the fans, you have to deliver on what they love. It’s also not just the old fans — fans of your version of the franchise will be annoyed as soon as they go into older parts of it and see how different it used to be.