The Brand Samurai

How Japan Defends Their Franchises to the Death and What America Refuses to Learn from it

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Why is there no sequel to Big Hero Six?

The budget was $165 million, which was pretty modest for a Marvel film even in 2014, which indeed this was, it had Stan Lee and everything. The box office take of $658 million (adjusted for inflation $900 million) was also a bit modest by the standards of Marvel back then, but still a solid hit. Today Marvel would kill for that kind of money.

But here’s the big thing it was a freaking merch kaiju. Baymax and Buddies hauled in $2 billion globally. For that kind of money, who the fuck cares if it made dime in the theaters?

On the face of it there should have been at least two sequels by now. But instead this S-Tier IP is just being left to rot on the shelf.

So why isn’t there a sequel?

Because Kevin Feige doesn’t want to make it.

The fact that Disney is leaving that kind of money on the table to keep a man who is becoming an extremely expensive ornament happy, shows how far down the Khesterex road Disney is at this point.

Big Hero Six was very much an Ike Perlmutter era Marvel production, which probably has a lot to do with why Feige is cold to it. Ike Perlmutter accidentally created the kind of mechanism that has guarded the likes of Gundam and Ultraman for a half century.

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What Perlmutter stumbled into, pretty much by accident, is something the Japanese entertainment industry has practiced deliberately for decades.

In Japan, the franchise itself is the primary asset, not the individual creator working on it. Directors come and go. Writers rotate. Animation studios rise and fall. But the brand remains under permanent stewardship.

The Japanese call these structures production committees.

A typical committee might include the toy company, the animation studio, the publisher, a television network, a music label, and sometimes a game company. Each participant owns a stake in the project and more importantly a stake in protecting the long-term viability of the brand.

Nobody gets to hijack the franchise to tell their own personal story.

And because multiple companies have money tied to the brand, radical deviations from the core concept are extremely difficult to push through.

This is why franchises like Mobile Suit Gundam have lasted nearly fifty years without losing their identity. Individual series can experiment (sometimes wildly) but the underlying rules of the universe remain recognizable. The committee acts as a kind of immune system, rejecting ideas that might poison the brand.

The same is true for Ultraman, which has survived since 1966 while passing through multiple studios, creative teams, and even ownership crises. The core mythology is protected because the property is treated less like a TV series and nearly like a national asset.

Even Pokémon operates under a similar philosophy. The Pokémon Company exists specifically to guard the brand from creative drift. Every new game, anime season, toy line, or trading card expansion passes through centralized oversight designed to ensure that Pikachu still looks like Pikachu and Pokémon still behaves like Pokémon.

The committee that protects Super Mario Brothers put its foot down on the richter scale when Columbia presented them with script featuring girl-boss Peach.

What these systems create is institutional memory.

The franchise remembers what it is.

American studios, by contrast, increasingly operate under the auteur franchise model.

Each new director or showrunner is encouraged to “put their stamp on the property.” The result is franchises that become vehicles for the personal vision of whoever happens to be holding the steering wheel that week.

Sometimes that works.

But more often it produces tonal whiplash and brand ablation.

A franchise stops being a franchise and becomes a sequence of disconnected reinterpretations.

In Japan, that simply isn’t allowed to happen.

A Gundam showrunner cannot decide that mobile suits are suddenly powered by friendship magic. An Ultraman director cannot decide that Ultraman is secretly the villain. Those ideas would die in the committee room before they ever reached production.

The brand comes first. The creatives are stewards, not owners.

What Ike Perlmutter accidentally recreated with the Marvel Creative Committee was a crude American version of this same system.

Ike Perlmutter started off by selling remaindered and factory seconds toys on the streets of New York City. He knew how to create and guard value in a brand at the lowest possible level. He bought Marvel to turn it into a merchandising mammoth.

The key to this success was the Marvel Creative Committee:

Ike Perlmutter

• Chairman of Marvel Entertainment

• Not a day-to-day creative voice, but the power behind the committee

Alan Fine

• Senior executive overseeing multiple Marvel divisions

• Often served as the liaison between Marvel corporate and Marvel Studios

Joe Quesada

• Later Chief Creative Officer of Marvel

• Represented the comics canon perspective

Dan Buckley

• Publishing side of Marvel

• Ensured synergy with comics

Brian Michael Bendis

• Major Marvel writer responsible for many modern storylines (Avengers, Ultimate Spider-Man)

What the committee did was review and give notes on scripts, character portrayals, major story decisions, brand consistency. And they could not be overruled.

You will note the names Kevin Feige and Louis D’Esposito were NOT listed on the committee. The truth was they hated the directives that came down from the committee and railed against it constantly. They wanted to pursue their own ideas independent of established canon.

In 2015, Ike Perlmutter ran afoul of Bob Iger during the first of his many succession crises. Bob Iger removed Perlmutter from any real day to day decision making. Marvel Studios began reporting directly to Disney Studios and the Marvel Creative Committee was dissolved.

The Infinity Saga was far enough down the production pipeline that Infinity War was unaffected. However, the damage became evident in 2019. Captain Marvel grossed over a billion but even then there were some questions regarding massive block ticket sales in the first week – the week when the studio gets 90% of the box office take.

During Infinity War, the parade of test screening panics, incoherent plot devices, CG Battle Cloud and Girls Get it Done scenes were now in evidence. The surprisingly well named, Doctor Strange and Multiverse of Madness had the same problems and was the last Marvel film that would get close to a billion dollars at the box office.

It was all downhill from there.

Darklings: What does Hollywood have against making money?

The Dark Herald: They love money, but they love status more.

That’s the real issue. The denizens of Hollywood are the most insecure people on Earth and they have every right to be.

Hooray for Hollywood

You may be homely in your neighbourhood

But if you think that you can be an actor, see Mr. Factor

He’ll make a monkey look good

Within a half an hour you’ll look like Tyrone Power

Hooray for Hollywood

They live in a world where they know everything is completely fake. Everything is the product of “glamour” in the old Celtic definition of the word. One moment you are a struggling nobody banging your head against the brick wall alongside all of the rest of the thousands of nobodies. Then your head accidently punches through the wall and a hundred eager hands grab you and pull you through to the other-side. You don’t know what you did to get there but you know that you now have to act like you belong on this-side of the wall or risk being thrown back over it to the other-side. And it’s not just actors, it’s everyone in the business.

Hollywood has a long tradition of bowing to the will of the successful auteur. It’s a big part of their own myth structure. It’s a big part of The Magic.

The problem is that it only worked when the executives were creatives themselves, or had worked their way up from the absolute bottom of business. The lowly mail clerk at the William Morris agency was once the greatest entry level position attainable in Hollywood. Titans like David Geffen, Mike Ovitz, Ron Meyer, and Barry Diller all started out as William Morris mail clerks. You had genuine creatives like Michael Eisner and Jeffery Katzenberg who moved to the other side of the streets and became executives but they still understood creativity.

But then credential inflation invaded Hollywood. MBAs and elite film schools replaced the “start at the bottom” model.

When the old home video market collapsed, these new executives became instantly reliant on data because you always default to your baseline training in a crisis. Established franchises had plenty of data, the problem was Hollywood was still reliant on its auteur model of creativity and there was absolutely no mechanism in place to protect franchises from auteurs.

The result was a bizarre hybrid system.

On paper Hollywood became obsessed with data. Test screenings. Focus groups. Social media sentiment tracking. Engagement metrics. “Audience quadrants.” Entire consulting firms sprung up whose sole job was to tell executives what spreadsheets thought about movies.

But the creative authority inside the system was still concentrated in the hands of auteurs. So what you got was the worst of both worlds.

A director or showrunner would come in with a personal vision for the franchise. The MBA executives would approve it. Production would begin. Then the test screenings would start. And the data would say something was wrong.

At that point the studio would panic.

Scenes would be rewritten. Characters would be cut. Reshoots would be ordered. Entire third acts would be replaced by the now-infamous CG Battle Cloud, because visual spectacle is the easiest way to glue a broken narrative together.

The result isn’t a coherent movie. It’s a committee patch job on top of an auteur experiment.

The reason the early Marvel films worked is that the Marvel Creative Committee prevented exactly this situation. The director could experiment inside the sandbox, but the sandbox itself was protected.

Once that structure disappeared, the sandbox disappeared with it. Now every new film is an attempt to reinvent the franchise from scratch.

One director wants a comedy. The next one wants a horror flick. The guy after that wants a deep political allegory. Finally comes the genius who wants a multiverse fever dream. And every damn one of them insists that this version is the true interpretation of the brand. Meanwhile the executives sit in the corner staring at dashboards full of data, hoping the numbers will magically tell them how to fix it.

They never do.

The problem isn’t data. The problem is that the franchise no longer has a guardian.

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Which brings us back to Big Hero 6.

On paper, this should have become one of Disney’s most aggressively expanded franchises of the last decade. It had everything a studio could possibly want.

A lovable mascot character in Baymax. A colorful team of heroes with toyetic designs. A setting that blends American and Japanese aesthetics. And most importantly… A merchandise machine that freaking printed money.

Baymax toys, plushies, costumes, lunchboxes, backpacks, Halloween outfits, theme park meet-and-greets. A whole Disney avalanche of consumer products. Globally the brand moved around two billion dollars in merchandise.

For most studios that kind of performance would trigger an immediate franchise expansion: sequels, streaming shows, spin-offs, theme-park attractions, video games, and probably a live-action remake somewhere down the road.

Instead the property quietly disappeared into the vault, because the internal structure that had produced it no longer existed. Big Hero 6 was one of the last Marvel-adjacent projects shaped under the old Perlmutter era governance model, where brand consistency mattered more than individual creative ego. Once that system was dismantled, the franchise lost its institutional champion.

And in Hollywood, a franchise without a champion turns into Starfleet Academy.

Meanwhile in Japan, a property like this would have triggered an immediate committee expansion. There would be:

A trilogy series.
A toy refresh cycle every three years.
An anime, a manga adaptation… And Webtoons.
A mobile game.
Possibly even a themed café in the Ginza.

Because Japan understands something Hollywood has forgotten.

A franchise is not a movie.

It is an ecosystem. And ecosystems require caretakers.

They require guardians.

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