Villain-Based Franchise

"One, two, Freddy's coming for you"...again and again and again...

"If you continue with the villain as the center of the story, which is certainly the Nightmare paradigm, you simply have to introduce a new set of victims every time. And after a while that becomes quite repetitive when you have no real story continuity except the villain. So then you sort of have to continue to concoct things like Freddy's youth or Freddy's this or that...but I think it gets stretched thinner and thinner."

— Wes Craven, discussing the potential pitfalls of this trope.

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A series linked by a recurring villain. The heroes and the locations may change or be dropped, but the central link remains the villain. The villain is frequently the Big Bad of the franchise and most or all of its installments, though this doesn't have to be the case to qualify for the trope.

Not the same as a series with a Villain Protagonist. Each installment may introduce a whole new set of heroes, but they may still be the protagonists.

Very popular with the Slasher Movie genre, probably because the heroes can die off in the end without ruining the series. Often though, the villain will appear to die at the end, to allow closure to the series if another one is not made. The End... Or Is It? ending optional.

The idea started with Pulp novels and villains like Fu Manchu or Fantômas.

If the franchise is named after the villain, do not confuse this with Antagonist Title. If the villain themselves appears as the mascot, they are a Mascot Villain. While the recurring villain in a Villain-Based Franchise usually features as the Villain Antagonist in the individual installments rather than as an outright Villain Protagonist, they are still the overarching main character in the series as a whole, disqualifing them from this trope.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The Time Bokan series has the most focus on the villains than the heroes.
• Although most of the Puella Magi Madoka Magica spin-off works have at least something to do with the protagonists of the main show, this is not always the case. For those works, the presence of the Incubator Hive Mind aka Kyubey is by necessity what links them together, as they have to be there to make the characters Magical Girls and manipulate them into falling to despair, which is the focus of the franchise.
• The plot of Monster is driven by its titular Big Bad, Johann Liebert, for whom said nickname is very well-earned.
• Paranoia Agent does have recurring heroes and side characters with their own story arcs, but the show never focuses solely on one of them, while every single episode focuses at least somewhat on Li'l Slugger/Shonen Bat, the serial assaulter. (As well as fictional character Maromi, because it's eventually revealed that they are basically the same thing, or at least connected phenomena.)

Comic Books

• Following the Brightest Day event, Superman based title Action Comics was retooled to star Superman's Arch-Enemy Lex Luthor, even being billed as Lex Luthor's Action Comics. This lasted about a year and followed Luthor's quest at godhood, which culminated in him actually getting it only to lose it when a condition of the godhood was that he couldn't use his new power to harm Superman.
• The BBC attempted to give the evil Daleks from Doctor Who their own spinoff in The '60s, but all it ended up amounting to were a few Dalek comic books.
• The Joker had a short comics series of his own in the 1970s, and Eclipso had an ongoing one in the 1990s. While radical in their day, villain-based series have since gotten more common.
• Similar to Action Comics above, the Spider-Man books took a stab at this after a storyline in which Spider-Man villain Doctor Octopus successfully pulled a Grand Theft Me on Peter Parker, resulting in the book being retooled into Superior Spider-Man. As with Lex above, the reset button was eventually pushed on this, but Marvel milked a couple of years worth of stories and plenty of outrage sales out of the stunt.
• The Tomb of Dracula comic, of course.

Films — Animated

• Disney Animated Canon:
  • Disney Villains. Most animated Disney films that failed at the box office will inevitably become this.
  • When The Black Cauldron failed, the Horned King became the only character from the film to ever appear in the merchandise.
  • Although 101 Dalmatians did fine at the box office, this has definitely happened with Cruella de Vil. Since the original release of the animated film, she's become a Breakout Character. When the live-action films came along, Cruella de Vil was treated as the starring role, with Glenn Close's name written in big letters on all the posters, and she basically became the central character. There's also a Broadway musical, and again Cruella (played by Rachel York) was treated as the starring role.

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Films — Live-Action

• The Predator films all feature at least one member of an alien species that serves as the villain. The Alien vs. Predator movies also feature them.
• The Alien franchise are all linked by the titular alien species that serves as the villains. While the original series all featured Ellen Ripley as the protagonist, the introduction of the prequels, without Ripley, turned it into a villain-based franchise. The aliens also provide the villains in the Alien vs. Predator series since the Predators are the Lesser of Two Evils between them—as murderous as they are, they can at least potentially be reasoned with.
• The Friday the 13th series featuring Jason Voorhees. The first movie did not have Jason as the killer, but his crazy mom instead, while the fifth movie features a Jack the Ripoff killer imitating the dead Jason. Even so, however, Jason is so deeply associated with the series that the titles of the last three films before it was remade (Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, Jason X, and Freddy vs. Jason) don't even have the full title of the series in them — but do prominently feature Jason's name, such that the series as a whole is often called simply "the Jason movies" without any confusion as to what the person using the term is talking about. Otherwise, the closest thing the series had to a recurring protagonist was Tommy Jarvis from the fourth, fifth, and sixth films.
• The A Nightmare on Elm Street series featuring Freddy Krueger. While the series did have recurring heroes in Nancy Thompson in the first and third films and Alice Johnson in the fourth and fifth, Freddy is the common denominator throughout the series; like with Friday the 13th above, they are often called "Freddy movies". Furthermore, unlike some horror franchises, it features the same actor recurring as the villain throughout. Excluding the 2010 remake (which cast Jackie Earle Haley), Robert Englund has reprised his killer role as Freddy Krueger in all eight original-series films.
• The Halloween series featuring Michael Myers. Laurie Strode and Dr. Sam Loomis did serve as heroes for most of the series, but Laurie was absent from the fourth, fifth, and sixth films (the "Curse of Thorn" timeline; all of these, incidentally, had Michael Myers' full name in the title), while Loomis was absent from the H20 timeline (which also includes Halloween: Resurrection). Notably, John Carpenter originally wanted to avert this and turn Halloween into an anthology series, making the third movie, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, about a wholly separate story from the first two. Fan and critical backlash to that film caused him to sell the rights to Moustapha Akkad, who brought Michael back with the fourth film, titled Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers to signify that The Shape was returning. After that, there was no looking back.
• The Child's Play series featuring Chucky, a Killer Doll possessed by the spirit of the Serial Killer Charles Lee Ray. Like with Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Chucky has been voiced by Brad Dourif in every film. Notably, even the series itself calls them "Chucky movies"; every film after Child's Play 3 has been titled some variation of "[blank] of Chucky", largely due to a complicated legal tangle.^note Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer owns the rights to the first movie and the Child's Play title, but Don Mancini owns the rights to the sequels and the franchise. This is why the 2019 remake had to heavily alter Chucky's backstory, as using the one from the films would have run up against Mancini's property. The later films Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky added a secondary villain in Chucky's lover Tiffany, voiced by Jennifer Tilly. The first three movies featured a central hero, Andy Barclay, but after the commercial failure of the third movie it was decided to retool the franchise into this (though Andy has returned in the more recent films as an adult after being Put on a Bus through the 2000s).
• The titular Living Dead are the only common link in the Living Dead Series by George A. Romero and John Russo, as well as The Return of the Living Dead by Russo (a spinoff that takes the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) as a form of Fiction as Cover-Up) and Zombi 2 by Lucio Fulci (an independent film that was marketed as an unofficial sequel to Dawn of the Dead (1978), which was titled Zombi in Italy).
• Godzilla, on the occasions that he's a villain.
• Universal Horror as a whole is an entire universe composed of multiple Villain-Based Franchises, with the monsters having been marketed together by Universal ever since The '40s. They eventually tried to revive the concept as a Modular Franchise with the Dark Universe, though the Box Office Bomb of The Mummy (2017), intended to lead off the franchise, has put its fate up in the air.
  • Dracula, with a host of books and movies based off the bloodsucking fiend. The most famous examples include the Universal films starting with Dracula (1931), and the Hammer Horror films starting with Horror of Dracula. This gets turned Up to Eleven in Hellsing, where the Count is the titled Sociopathic Hero protagonist who ends up victorious, lampshading the whole 'Dracula returns' at the end.
  • Frankenstein is a similar case, with Universal's 1931 adaptation spinning off a series of horror films that may or may not have featured Dr. Victor Frankenstein or his descendants, but always featured the Monster front and center. This trope is best evidenced by the fact that people frequently refer to the monster himself as "Frankenstein", even though that was the name of his creator. (The movie I, Frankenstein had it both ways and had the monster take on Frankenstein as his last name, seeing the man who created him as his 'father'.)
  • The Mummy (1932) and its quasi-remake in 1940, The Mummy's Hand, the latter of which spawned multiple sequels. The titular mummy was named Imhotep in the original (which the 1999 remake also used) and played by Boris Karloff, and named Kharis in Hand and its sequels and played by Lon Chaney Jr., but the Broad Strokes are similar enough that Hand is often mistaken for a sequel. Save for the mummy, there are very few returning characters between films.
  • The Invisible Man. Technically a Legacy Character, as the title character in The Invisible Man Returns was a different person, but the common denominator in both films is a man who turns invisible and uses the freedom offered by his new power to go on a rampage.
  • There were three Creature from the Black Lagoon films, all of which had the Gill-man (played by Ricou Browning in the underwater scenes) and no other returning characters.
• The Phantasm series featuring the Tall Man. Though the heroes return as well... sort of.
• The Maniac Cop trilogy featuring Matt Cordell, a deranged former cop who now kills innocents instead of protecting them.
• The Psycho Cop duology with Joe Vickers, a Satan worshipper who kills anyone whom he deems to be guilty.
• The Leprechaun series with the titular character, played by Warwick Davis in every film except the 2014 reboot Leprechaun: Origins.
• The Hellraiser films eventually became one of these, focusing more on Pinhead, played by Doug Bradley for eight films, from the original up until Hellworld. Bradley eventually left the series when the poor quality and Ashcan Copy nature of Revelations proved to be too much even for him to take, though the part was simply recast from there and the series kept going.
• The sequels to the original Prom Night (1980) tried to become one with Mary-Lou Maloney. She was dropped from the fourth movie.
• The Ring has its famous Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl, known as Sadako Yamamura in the original book and the Japanese films and Samara Morgan in the American films.
• The Stepfather films with Jerry Blake.
• Shocker featuring Horace Pinker was an attempt to create one, but low sales ended these plans.
• The Warlock trilogy featuring the titular character. The origin stories of the character in each film are too inconsistent for it to be the same Warlock however, making it more a Legacy Character.
• The Final Destination series, where the recurring villain is Fate or Death itself.
• The Saw franchise is driven by the Poetic Serial Killer Jigsaw, who puts people in Death Traps. It's the same villain for the first few, then his apprentices take his place.
• The lesser-known Sleepaway Camp series. Notably, the killer's identity is the subject of the big twist in the first film (and a famously shocking one at that), but in the second and third films, Angela's face is put right up on the posters.
• Angela in the original Night of the Demons (1988) was just another demon-possessed person. In Night of the Demons 2 and Night of the Demons 3, she is the leader of the demonic debauchery.
• The Doctor Mabuse series is one of The Oldest Ones in the Book, starting before talkies.
• The Abominable Dr. Phibes and its sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again. Each gives the eponymous abominable doctor a new nemesis, with the only other recurring characters being a pair of ineffectual detectives.
• The Wishmaster series is centered around an evil genie, although the one in the third and fourth movie seems to be a different Djinn from the one in the first and second.
• In a way, the Terminator series, with SkyNet. The movies do have central protagonists in John Connor and his mother Sarah, but not only is the villain always a Terminator Killer Robot — even if it's not one that looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger — but some media only feature said machines.
• Tremors: While Burt Gummer is a recurring character in most of the franchise, he cannot really be said to be the primary one. The Graboids and their different life cycles are the center of attention.
• The Hatchet films have Victor Crowley, who is notably played by Kane Hodder, the most famous of the various actors/stuntmen to play the aforementioned Jason Voorhees. While the first three films do have a recurring heroine in Marybeth Dunston, she was recast in the second film (with Danielle Harris replacing Tamara Feldman) and is outright gone from the fourth film outside The Stinger, while Hodder played Crowley through all four films. The fourth film, in fact, is simply titled Victor Crowley.

Literature

• The Night of the Living Dummy series from the Goosebumps books.
• Hannibal Lecter, who became more and more the protagonist as new books came out, though he suffered from Badass Decay. Downplayed, to an extent, as he was never the out and out Big Bad of any of the novels; he was a supporting antagonist in Red Dragon, an Evil Mentor in The Silence of the Lambs, a Living Macguffin in Hannibal, and finally the protagonist in Hannibal Rising. There's yet to be a Big Bad in the Hannibal series who survives the end of the novel.
• Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu series — sure, Fu's nemesis Nayland Smith was in all of them, but who got title billing?
• Fantômas, from the series of French pulp novels written by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre (and later by Allain alone after Souvestre's death) starting in 1911.
• A lot of the Old Republic era of the Star Wars Expanded Universe is linked by the Sith. In recent years, practically every villain in every era has been a Sith.
• An in-universe example is the fictional Emperor Zhark series mentioned in the Thursday Next books.

Multiple media

• The Scream franchise became one with its TV adaptation. While the films had several recurring characters in addition to Ghostface (itself an identity worn by different people in each film), the only thing linking the TV series to the films is the presence of a killer named Ghostface who wears a white mask and black cloak, uses a hunting knife as a Weapon of Choice, and taunts victims through Harassing Phone Calls before attacking them. It was especially the case with the reboot Scream: Resurrection, which not only brought back the original Ghostface mask from the films (the prior two seasons used a different mask due to copyright issues) but also brought back the original voice of Ghostface, Roger L. Jackson, while remaining in a wholly separate continuity.

Professional Wrestling

• Kaiju Big Battel's Big Bad Dr. Cube is also the most recognized figure in the promotion. This is partially because his helmet is the logo. Though he eventually dies.
• The Fuyuki Army promotion was a bit of a mixed bag. The intent was pretty clear, given that it was an FMW spinoff and the wrestler it centered around, Kodo Fuyuki, was on his way to a Tyrant Takes the Helm plot in FMW, but fans who better knew Fuyuki for his work in All Japan Pro Wrestling were likely to cheer for him.
• WCW tried to do one with the nWo, to turn it into its own brand. However, people started to view the nWo as boring invincible villains at the time, so giving them their own show where surprise, surprise, the nWo won every match, turned out to be a turn off to many viewers.
• WWE Raw from 2002 until 2005 with Triple H.
• While the joshi fed GAEA was active, Mayumi Ozaki waged a personal war against it and founded an "Oz Academy" in 1998 to train new wrestlers to help her in this cause. When Chigusa Nagayo opted to discontinue GAEA and retire however, Passing the Torch to Meiko Satomura, Mayumi turned the Oz Academy into its own full-fledged promotion to rival Meiko's GAEA successor, Sendai Girls.
• Kai En Tai, a power stable with the humble origin of menacing Michinoku Pro Wrestling later expanded into the United States via ECW's bWo Japan, which lead to one half of the stable's Dream Chasers Tag Team, TAKA Michinoku, founding a "KAIENTAI Dojo" in Puerto Rico during the year 2000. A year after ECW closed, TAKA returned to Japan and started running his own shows with the students from said dojo.
• The Apache Army, a promotion primarily made up of former FMW wrestlers that primarily invaded other promotions while FMW was inactive.
• Los Perros Del Mal, a Card-Carrying Villain Power Stable who operated in CMLL and AAA, later founded their very own wrestling promotion, named after themselves, Perros Del Mal Producciones. They remain the bad guys even on their own show.

Video Games

• The Ape Escape series has a different Kid Hero each game, but evil genius monkey Specter is always the villain.
• Diablo is based upon the eponymous demon lord, who always seems to return to threaten the fate of the world. Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 bring in the other six Great Evils for some scheming of their own, but Diablo's still the one to take center stage by the end.
• Castlevania is linked by its main villain Dracula. This even extends to the Sorrow games, which are set in the future after Drac's Final Death. Who is the player character? His reincarnation!
  • Really, Dracula in all of his incarnations.
• With the exception of the fourth game (though they still influence the plot to a degree), Resident Evil centers around the Umbrella Corporation and its successors.
• The heroes asking the question cycles depending on the series, but they're always asking the question "Where in |the World/America/Time/Hell/etc.| is Carmen Sandiego?"
• SHODAN is so synonymous with the System Shock series that the second game featured her on the cover despite her mere presence in the game being a massive spoiler at the time. Years later, SHODAN's voice would be one of the very first things revealed for the third game.
• In one way or another, the main stories of the Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting series seem to revolve around Geese Howard. By the time The King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match comes around, he's also present in that as a secret boss, out-bossing a considerable cast of SNK Bosses. Also, in Capcom vs. SNK, Geese is Ratio 6 when fought as a boss, since you fight him twice as Ratio 3, when the highest a character goes in the game, Akuma (Gouki) as a secret character, is Ratio 4.

• Every Kingdom Hearts game in the Dark Seeker Saga (Kingdom Hearts to III and every spin-off or side game released in-between) is linked by Master Xehanort, an elderly Keyblade master who just won't stay dead, and his many incarnations. He's even the Villain Protagonist of Dark Road, and his influence lingers beyond the saga's events in Melody of Memory. Whether a new villain will antagonize the next several games or if the series will move on to one-off villains is yet to be seen.
• The Mother/EarthBound series is a special case. None of the heroes ever return, but the Big Bad from the first one reappears in the next one, in which a Dragon for him is introduced. The third one then features only The Dragon from the second one, since the original Big Bad was killed in the second game. A couple of characters (how many exactly depends on the player) from the second game appear, though, and Ness, the hero from it, is referenced a lot.
• The Tale of ALLTYNEX of course focusing on the malevolent A.I. Alltynex.
• The main focus of the First Encounter Assault Recon series is its resident Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl/Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds Alma.
• In its final years, the arcade division of Irem produced several post-apocalyptic action games whose only real link was the villains, a terrorist organisation know as the "Dark Anarchy Society". The games part of this universe are (in order) Air Duel, Undercover Cops, Fire Barrel, In the Hunt and Gunforce II.
• The Five Nights at Freddy's series has a different protagonist for (almost) every game, but the villains are always animatronics and ocasionally humans, but the award has to be given to Freddy Fazbear or William Afton.
  • Freddy Fazbear is of course the titular character, who has the biggest amount of counterparts and appears in every game, no matter if he's withered, a hallucination, or a dream.
  • William Afton, on the other hand, kickstarted the entire franchise and has been linked to every single entry in the franchise (with one, non-canon exception). While he took the role of the Big Bad in only three games (and he's part of the Big Bad Duumvirate in one of them), he's without a doubt one for the entire series, with every single event being linked to him. Not to mention his Joker Immunity, a contrast to Freddy, who's been Killed Off for Real as early as the third game and had different counterparts replace his role.
• The Donkey Kong series is an interesting case. The title character starts out as a villain in Donkey Kong (with Mario aka Jumpman as the hero), reappears as Distressed Dude in Donkey Kong Jr. (with Mario as the villain) and again as a villain in Donkey Kong 3 (with Stanley as the hero). Later he becomes the hero in the Donkey Kong Country series and several other games. Meanwhile, the protagonist from Donkey Kong, Mario, got his own spin-off series named after himself. Donkey Kong reappears as a villain in the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series, but this time his opponent Mario is in every one of the games.

Visual Novels

• The When They Cry series centers around its villains, many of them as the result of progressing insanity. Also an example of a Villain Protagonist, not that the characters themselves realize it until it's too late. Though subverted as it is mainly because of a Hate Plague, with the Big Bad causing it not being revealed until the end of the seventh chapter.
• Danganronpa has Monokuma, the sadistic robot Killer Teddy Bear who pushes the cast of each game into killing each other. By extension, Junko Enoshima is often revealed as the main antagonist of each entry in the Hope’s Peak Saga, and the main recurring character- every other villain often has some connection to her. In Danganronpa 3 Side:Future and Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, even though Junko is dead/fictional respectively, her influence still lingers on, with the anime mastermind having been corrupted by a minion of her and the V3 mastermind being a Loony Fan of her.

Web Originals

• The Slender Man Mythos. Many authors, many situations, one Humanoid Abomination.
  • Its spin-off, The Fear Mythos, features roughly twenty additional abominations running around causing havoc.
• This post from C.T. Phipps' blog The United Federation of Charles goes into detail on the subject. He specifically describes it as the difference between Slasher Horror and Survival Horror; the former is about the villains killing people in creative ways, while the latter focuses on the heroes fighting for survival. While he prefers survival horror, and thinks that the worst slasher horror can run afoul of the Eight Deadly Words as the audience lacks any reason to care about the people dying, he thinks the slasher approach has merit as well, especially when it comes to creating memorable, personal villains.

Western Animation

• Each season of Code Lyoko has a plot that focuses almost entirely on XANA's schemes, attacks and evolution. Which is kinda ironic considering he is never actually seen or heard in person.
• Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! couldn't exist without the eponymous killer tomatoes.
• In Spiral Zone, the name of the show itself is the thing that the heroes are trying to fight; a Synthetic Plague/Fog of Doom created by Overlord to Take Over the World.

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