Are original films more unequal than franchise films?

Read it in Reel Metrics →

Short answer: Yes — and the gap tripled in 25 years. Among U.S. wide releases (500+ peak theaters), the franchise Gini rose from 0.44 (2000–07) to 0.57 (2021–25). Original Gini rose from 0.49 to 0.71 over the same eras. The category audiences are supposed to love for its surprises is the more winner-take-all of the two.

Key findings

• The fan spreads. The 90th-percentile franchise entry nearly doubled from $178M(2000)to$336M (2025) while the median stayed essentially flat ($65M\to$64M). The 90/50 ratio grew from 2.7x to 5.3x — all of the category’s growth happened at the top.
• The floor fell out. The 10th-percentile franchise entry grossed $23Min2000and$8M in 2025. Franchise IP no longer guarantees meaningful box office — flops like The Crow ($9Mona$50M budget), Madame Web ($43Mon$80M), and Kraven the Hunter ($25Mon$110M) would have been unthinkable in the early 2000s.
• Top-10 concentration. Ten franchise families captured 47% of franchise revenue in 2021–25, up from 32% in 2000–07. The top three alone captured 24% (down from a 2015–19 peak of 31% when the MCU was at full strength).
• Originals are more unequal than franchises. Franchise Gini: 0.44 → 0.57. Original Gini: 0.49 → 0.71. The gap tripled. A 0.57 Gini is roughly NBA player-salary inequality; 0.71 approaches S&P 500 market-cap inequality. The franchise floor (~$8M) is the difference — originals don’t have one.
• “Franchise” is not a useful category. The top 10 franchise families operate in a different market from the other 130+ active families. Aggregating them under a single label obscures more than it reveals.

Data

CPRF Movie Database: 4,751 U.S. wide-release films (500+ peak theaters), 2000 through early 2026, hand-classified as franchise or original with three-tier overrides for ambiguous cases. Gini coefficients computed over annual domestic gross within each category using identical methodology. Cross-industry Gini benchmarks (NBA salaries, S&P 500 market cap) are directional anchors, not identity-matched claims.

Publication

Chapter 4 of the Reel Metrics Anatomy of a Franchise Economy series.

See also

• How saturated is the box office with franchise films — Chapter 1, the macro split between title share and dollar share
• How did Disney come to dominate the box office — Chapter 3, the studio-level mechanics behind the concentration
• Why are movies getting longer — same CPRF Movie Database, source-material analysis
• How much is an Oscar win worth at the box office — prestige-revenue mechanics on the same dataset
• Who do my movie tastes overlap with — film selection in a concentrated market