XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Narrativas Parceladas: The Brazilian Film Franchise and the Art of Parcelamento

• In Event: The Economics and Politics of Contemporary Brazilian Cinema

Abstract

In 2013, the domestic box office receipts for Brazilian cinema doubled from the previous year. The top grossing national films were popular comedies that launched successful film franchises. Over the course of the next decade, domestic film production was sustained by the success of multiple film comedy franchises (i.e., seven of the top film franchises in Brazilian film history were comedic series released during the 2010s).

Most scholars approach the film franchise as a figurehead of Hollywood’s commercial imperatives. This paper examines the film franchise from the vantage of the Global South in order to reassess its industrial and cultural determinants. I analyze a pair of high-grossing Brazilian film comedy franchises - De Pernas pro Ar (2010-2019) and Até que a Sorte Nos Separe (2012-2015) - to tease out the economics of the franchise at both the material-industrial and narrative-aesthetic levels. This paper asks (a) how and why does sequelization occur outside of Hollywood?, and (b) how does comedy inflect the franchise’s investments in repetition, difference, continuation, and retroactivity?

With regards to the former, both franchises were made possible by financial instruments of credit and debt that transformed domestic film production. With regards to the latter, this paper draws on new economic criticism to argue that the narrative structuration of the film franchise over the course of multiple installments might be understood best in parallel to the transformation of consumer credit since the 1970s. In the Brazilian context, the most popular consumer credit device is the “compra parcelada” or installment payment plan, which dates back to the period of hyperinflation of the 1980s. The multiple installments of the film franchise resonate with the temporal organization and structuring of consumer desire afforded by the art of parcelamento.

I recast the never-conclusive consumption of the film franchise as a textual experience indebted to the temporality of credit. This paper concludes that the franchise is not only an economic venture but also a capitalist aesthetic phenomenon, where “originality” is less significant than the temporal distension of textuality, and the franchise’s perpetual diegesis is on layaway.

Author

• Nilo Couret, University of Michigan