Frozen: Media Franchising and Disney’s Administered Culture

The article is set to explore Disney’s Frozen (2013) as a potential approach to franchise film. Since the new millennium, Disney has become the biggest advocate of Hollywood media franchising. As generally understood, the serialized form of franchise film developed by the Hollywood media conglomerates has increasingly become the engine that drives the expansion for the entire media conglomerate. However, the article argues that the relations between media franchising and the monopolistic conglomeration need further investigation. To understand Frozen as a franchise, the article explores the intra-conglomerate cultural production at Disney, following the dialectics between culture and administration as presented by Adorno in “Culture and Administration.” In the main, the article argues that for the Disney company, franchising allows administration to subsume the creativity and autonomy of culture so as to serve the interest of monopoly capital. In summary, Disney is seeking more integration from above with media franchising in the entertainment sphere, which accords with Adorno’s critical concept of the administered culture, and thus creating a kind of Disney administered culture.