OCT 12, 2026 · Franchises

Franchises

What Changed When We Fixed the Data

We audited the franchise dataset behind our FRANCHISE report, rebuilt it from Wikipedia's October 2026 list and recomputed every published number. Merchandise still dominates (55.8%), but the Japan–US ranking flipped and Hello Kitty's $80B was a source error.

By Kyle McAuliffe · 2026-10-12 · 4 min

Executive summary. Research is only as good as its ledger, so we treat corrections as findings. We re-audited the data behind FRANCHISE: Merchandise Owns the Ledger, rebuilt it from Wikipedia's October 2026 list, and recomputed every number we had published. The core finding survives: merchandise is still 55.8% of franchise revenue. Three readings change. Box office looks twice as big, but mostly because it is now counted more completely. Ownership is more concentrated (top five parents 58.2%, up from 46.4%). And the Japan–US comparison reverses.

WHAT WE CHECKED

The original report used the TidyTuesday file of July 2, 2019: 321 rows, 103 franchises, eight revenue categories. It had no missing values or duplicates, but it had 15 placeholder rows under $10 million (Star Wars TV at $0.004B), six cells with leftover Wikipedia citation tags, 59 with stray double spaces, and owner names from 2019 (AT&T, Viacom, Activision Blizzard).

We then checked it against the source it was scraped from — the Wikipedia revision of June 29, 2019 — for a random sample of 40 franchises (seed 20261012). Thirty-nine matched. Only 5 agreed with the itemised breakdown within 1%, and 28 of 39 came within 10% of the headline total. The file was always lower, because its eight-category schema dropped line items that did not fit: card games, theme parks, pachinko. James Bond is the extreme case at $13.9B against $19.9B.

OLD VS NEW

Published is the number in the report before October 2026. Raw new recomputes it from the unchanged 2019 file (every figure reproduces exactly). Clean new uses the rebuilt October 2026 ledger; brackets are 95% bootstrap ranges. Dollar figures are USD billions, nominal.

WHY THE BIG NUMBERS MOVED

Source revisions, not declines. Hello Kitty ($80.0B→$33.5B), Mario ($35.0B→$9.74B) and Gundam ($25.5B→$5.0B) fell because Wikipedia editors replaced older estimates with better-sourced ones. Neither Sanrio nor Nintendo reported a collapse. We flag these rows rather than quote them as change.

Real growth. Pokémon (+$39.8B), Call of Duty (+$14.0B) and Naruto (+$13.9B) added seven years of sales and newly itemised mobile revenue.

Measurement. Box office went from 8.9% to 18.3% of the ledger. On the 82 franchises in both vintages it is 15.4%, and on franchises above $4B it is 15.0%. Most of the jump is the 2026 list counting theatrical grosses more completely.

Coverage. The list grew from 103 to 140. Forty-three of the 58 additions are US-origin (Fortnite, Avatar, Madden NFL), while Japanese titles such as Detective Conan, Digimon and Bleach left the English table. Together with the downward revisions, that turns “Japan out-earns the US” into “the US out-earns Japan, and Japan is more merchandise-heavy.”

Consolidation. Assigning franchises to today's parents (Activision Blizzard and King into Microsoft, Fox into Disney, Viacom into Paramount Skydance) lifts the top-five share. On the same 2019 franchises it would be 62.8%.