New And Wild Ways To Interact With Your Favourite Franchises
Big franchise stories used to end when the credits rolled. Now they serve as entry points. Fans step past the screen into games, communities, costumes, and real-world spaces that keep the universe alive long after the final scene. These extensions range from simple online stories to full-scale immersive venues, and the options keep multiplying.
Get Your Game On!
Games based on movies – everything from Stars Wars to Disney films like Aladdin – have been around for decades, but now they are finally the love and care that they deserve. Of course, they run the whole gamut from big blockbuster releases like Star Wars: Fallen Order, to crazy weird fan-made stuff that falls into the category of free sex games. You can go on wild adventures playing as your favourite characters, or step into a wider universe and play as original characters who interact with everyone from Darth Vader to Iron Man (not in the same game though! Let’s make that clear right away!).
Recent titles keep the momentum going. Star Wars: Zero Company arrives in August 2026 as a turn-based tactics game set during the early Empire era. Star Wars: Galactic Racer follows in October 2026. Marvel fans can expect Deadpool VR later this year, while TMNT Empire City brings another property into the virtual space. Hardware costs have dropped and more headsets support standalone play, which means broader access for fans who want to move through these worlds instead of watching them.
Immersive Physical Experiences and Pop-Ups
Studios now build permanent spaces that blend digital overlays with physical rooms. Netflix House locations in Philadelphia and Dallas let visitors complete Stranger Things and Squid Game quests inside recreated sets. A planned Las Vegas site will expand the same model. Disney opened a permanent immersive entertainment center in Tokyo in 2024 that mixes VR and AR across multiple franchises. Warner Bros. launched a London experience where guests use AR tools inside detailed Harry Potter environments. These venues turn ticketed events into repeatable, location-based extensions of the original stories.
AR and Metaverse Fan Interactions
Augmented reality layers let viewers alter story paths or explore side locations that never appeared on screen. Some experiments turn films into choose-your-own-adventure formats with real-time input. Sony and Epic Games have partnered on Unreal Engine tools that support shared virtual environments. Metaverse platforms host live events where fans appear as avatars, attend panels, or role-play scenes together. These tools sit between traditional gaming and passive viewing, adding another lane for ongoing engagement.
Fan Fiction Factories
Why should only a small group of producers, writers, and executives have a say over a story that you dearly love? When you go and visit online repositories of millions of stories based on well know characters you will come to appreciate just how popular these pop culture epics are.
fanfiction.net still draws tens of millions of monthly visits. Writers post new chapters, readers leave notes, and small groups form around specific ships or alternate timelines. The feedback loop stays the same: comments shape revisions, and popular ideas sometimes influence later official works. The platform keeps the community aspect central even as new tools for formatting and tagging appear.
AI-Powered Personalization and Creation Tools
Generative AI now helps fans build custom worlds, non-player characters, and visual assets for their own stories and games. Tools can generate consistent character designs across dozens of scenes or produce background environments that match existing franchise aesthetics. Entertainment reports for 2026 highlight how these systems feed into the creator economy, letting users personalize everything from fan fiction illustrations to modded game levels without advanced technical skills.
Getting Into Character…Literally
Fan conventions have just been growing and growing as Star Wars, Marvel and every other pop-fi franchise you can imagine become a bigger part of our collective culture. And there’s no better way to celebrate this than taking attending these events to the next level: Dressing up as your favourite characters. This can be from a quickly and funny costume you put together with things from around your house, or something professionally planned and made months in advance for the event you are planning to attend. Some people have even found ways to make a living out of it!
Of course, there is plenty to consider, especially the feasibility and comfort of the costume. It’s great that you are a huge Chewbacca fan, but that’s a hell of a lot of fur and masks to deal with. Heck, even if you think you just have to wear a robe and suddenly you’re Harry Potter, wands don’t come cheap and make sure that lightning bolt scar on your forehead looks legit.
The next step in their world of cosplay after conventions (where you might be ‘in character’ for a bit of time when someone might want a photo) is LARP events. LARP stands for ‘Live-Action RolePlay’, and it involves several people getting together and staying in character for the entire event, which might be days.
2026 schedules include Anime Expo in Los Angeles and multiple GalaxyCons across the country. LARP festivals continue alongside these larger gatherings, giving participants longer runs in character. The practice remains tied to the same franchises that dominate streaming charts and box office reports.
Upcoming Franchise Games and Expansions
Star Wars: Eclipse is still in development for the High Republic era, while Fate of the Old Republic explores earlier timeline stories. These titles join the 2026 slate already mentioned and show studios continuing to invest in interactive entries rather than one-off tie-ins. Each release adds new playable corners of the same shared universe, keeping long-term fans occupied between film or series drops.
Anime 101: It’s About Time You Learned
If you haven’t checked out at least one bit of Japanese animation (known as ‘anime’) over the last few decades, then you are are in a pretty exclusive club…but for all the wrong reasons, because there’s a lot more to it than just giant robots fighting aliens (but you won’t have to look hard to find that, either). And in case you’ve looked a bit like an idiot when people ask you about your favourite movies or series, we’re here to give you a quick primer.
It (Usually) Starts With a Comic Book
In Japan, comics books are referred to as manga, and like comic books, they were extremely popular with the youth in the mid-twentieth century, to the point where by the eighties and nineties, the biggest ones eventually had tv and movie equivalents. In fact, some of the biggest Magna/anime titles became massive merchandising hits as well and even branched out into other media, including some rather naughty sex games with beautiful girls. The style of this animation – big eyes, expressive faces that get cartoon-like, and long slim bodies that typically ended up in a wild uniform – even inspired plenty of western animation as well.
The anime market reached roughly $37.7 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $41.7 billion in 2026, growing at a 9.2 percent compound annual rate. Manga licensing drives much of that expansion into international markets.
Superior Sci-Fi
While the sixties era TV series Astro Boy might have been the first crossover hit, it wasn’t until 1988, with the release of the film Akira (which yes, was originally a manga) that the world truly woke up to the brilliance of anime. People still fawn over it today, since it tells a mind-blowing cyber-punk story involving a motorcycle gang in New-Tokyo accidentally getting involved with a terrorist group fighting against the military. Throw in some creepy science experiments and telepathic warfare, and you have a cyberpunk masterpiece that’s just as gripping and shocking today. It took a while for Akira to make an impact in North America and Europe, but it happened much quicker for 1995’s ‘Ghost in the Shell’. Asking plenty of philosophical questions about what it means to be a human (or a machine), it does an amazing job balancing a reflective drama about the ethics of being a government assassin and the action scenes that obviously will come with being a government assassin. In fact, if there was one vehicle I could own from any film franchise, it would be the spider tank.
A new Ghost in the Shell series from Science SARU is slated for 2026 and returns to the original artistic style of the source material.
Sailor Moon and the Power of the TV Series
In between the two films mentioned above, a little show about a whiny Tokyo high school student who had a secret life debuted in Japan, and then later around the world. And it changed everything. Sailor Moon ran the premise of fighting near-identical monsters in each episode into the ground, but it didn’t matter much, because it had plenty of heart, had some catchy music, and ten-year-olds the world over had their parents spent tons on merchandise. Plenty of other series – from Dragonball to Pokemon – would follow Sailor Moon’s success.
A Word on Studio Ghibli
While it’s easy to talk about individual films and their directors and writers, there is one Japanese animated studio where the name alone has all the artistic weight and respect: Studio Ghibli, which is the outlet primarily for Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, who went back and forth on projects that have ultimately become adored and critically acclaimed the world over. While embracing the fantasy elements seen in plenty of other anime, these films typically eschew traditional narrative beats, and rarely cast an obvious antagonist. There are many ways to analyze these films, and if you don’t want to bother with that, don’t worry, because, Spirited Away might just be the best-animated film ever, period. At the same time, you owe it to yourself to watch the gleeful fun that is My Neighbour Totoro, as well as the intense and mesmerizing pro-environmental Princess Mononoke.
Studio Ghibli Fest 2026 includes theatrical runs marking the 25th anniversary of Spirited Away, the 40th of Castle in the Sky, and other milestone screenings. A new illustrated story set in the Howl's Moving Castle universe appeared in February 2026, giving readers another entry point into that world.
