I take major issue with Dr. Who being #1.
To be the #1 murdered franchise, it needs to have been at least one of the top 10 most popular. And it just... wasn't. It was always lame, low-tier, low production value, lazy Brit-style no consequences and everything resets at the end crap.
The franchises had it comin'. They may not have killed film, but they were at least a symptom. (TV is a different story.)
The franchises need to go, if we ever want to see good movies again.
There's a lot of truth to this, and I have to admit to feeding this demon when I was younger. I probably poured thousands of dollars into Star Wars. Movie tickets, VHS/DVD copies, boxed sets, action figures, books, video games, over 20-25 years. And the fact that I bought multiple copies of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books (along with millions of other fans) is exactly what led to Rafe Judkins' trainwreck of a presentation on Amazon.
I remember being so disappointed reading Terry Brooks' Shannara series and then finding out that his Knight of the Word series was not independent of Shannara, it was a prequel environment to Shannara. I think my inner cynic hatched that day on that realization.
One of my favorite authors that I think is greatly underappreciated today, is Neil Gaiman. He's prolific, he's entertaining, he's charming, and he's ORIGINAL. His books don't hook together. I may be wrong about that, I haven't read everything of his (I now make it a point to not allow a single author to monopolize my reading attention so as to avoid this phenomenon I ascribe to the 80's and 90's).
