Back in early 2003, five years before Iron Man launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and nearly a decade before Disney acquired Lucasfilm and turned Star Wars into a streaming-franchise-cum-theme-park attraction, MIT’s then-codirector of comparative media studies, Henry Jenkins, attended a conference hosted by the game studio Electronic Arts. With a selection of creatives invited from across disciplines, the matter at hand would dominate popular culture for the next two decades: How could franchises expand beyond just one or two mediums? How could they achieve what EA’s head of intellectual property development, Danny Bilson, called a “deepening of the universe”?
