Recently Disney announced the official title for the stand-alone Han Solo film: “Solo: a Star Wars Story.” As the excitement surrounding “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” which comes out this month, is escalating and fans are already pulling their old Luke and Chewbacca costumes out of the closet to dress in when they see the midnight showing, Disney has been taking more and more steps to expand the Star Wars Universe. It all started last year when “Rogue One: a Star Wars Story” premiered in theaters. This was the biggest Star Wars movie to date that was not a part of the main saga, and it contained an all-star cast with actors like Felicity Jones, Forest Whitaker, and Mads Mikkelsen leading it. Now it has recently been announced that Rian Johnson, the director of “The Last Jedi,” will be directing at least three more Star Wars films. “Rogue One,” “Solo,” and the future sequels are turning Star Wars into what I was afraid it would become: a franchise.

Cinema proves to be an ever-changing art form. It has encountered countless points of change and revolution, like “Cupid Angling” being released as the first film in color in 1918, “Fantasia 2000” being the first ever IMAX movie, and the current revolution of streaming services like Netflix and Amazon creating their own independent TV and film projects. And just like those other milestones in cinema, franchising has proven to be a revolution in Hollywood. More and more A-list actors are cast in different franchise films. Just last month Cate Blanchett appeared in “Thor: Ragnarok,” for instance, and Helen Mirren has expressed her desire to be in the “Fast and Furious” films many times by now. Franchising is a serious element of Hollywood now, but is franchising a movie universe always for the better?

Arguably the franchise that started this chain reaction of other expanded universes appearing was the Marvel Cinematic Universe. On May 4th, 2018, “Iron Man,” the first official film of the MCU, was released, starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jeff Bridges. Almost ten years later the MCU is one of the most successful franchises in the world. Four of its films have grossed over a billion dollars worldwide, most of its films have received mainly positive reviews, and top-tiered actors like Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Renner, Samuel L. Jackson, and Benedict Cumberbatch are among the many to have joined the MCU cast in the last ten years.

However, the success of the MCU has inspired other franchises that are less successful and acclaimed, such as the DC Extended Universe. The DCEU started in 2013 with “Man of Steel,” a movie with mediocre reviews and not as big of a final box office revenue as “Iron Man,” the movie that started the MCU. And even though actors like Jared Leto, Ben Affleck, and Amy Adams have all joined the DCEU since “Man of Steel,” most of the DCEU movies have been either acceptable or terrible, with “Wonder Woman” being the only exception so far. However, the producers of the DCEU will without a doubt continue to make mediocre movies because they have all become about one thing and one thing only: money.

Franchise movies often do extremely well. The last two big MCU movies of 2017, “Thor: Ragnarok” and “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” both crossed the $250 million mark in the domestic box office alone. The success of the MCU has without a doubt inspired the initiation of other franchises like the DCEU, Star Wars, and (soon to be) Tomb Raider in film, and The Big Bang Theory, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead franchises on TV. However, in franchising films, there also lies danger. Because producers and creators of franchises know that new projects in the franchise usually make a lot of money regardless of quality, they start funding and creating more and more material until it becomes low-quality. For instance, the DCEU is suffering heavily from bad critical reviews, but the same people who have already made bad DCEU movies are put at the helm of more of them because the producers know that doing so is a formula that works for a big box office revenue. Essentially the art and the craftsmanship in these movies is then lost, and what is created instead is almost like an assembly line of content that gets released without the creators giving any of it much thought and dedication.

Franchises therefore always face the danger of reaching a low quality, which then ruins the franchises’ original movies. In the cases of Star Wars and the MCU, for instance, the original movies are very good films, therefore it really is a shame. Franchises should therefore be taken good care of and not made into easy cash grabs for producers, or else the legacies of both the individual films in the franchise and of this age of franchising in Hollywood will be heavily tainted.