In the twenty-first century, children’s media and entertainment is big business. In a media landscape increasingly dominated by franchised media and entertainment, the media industries of the twenty-first century are increasingly turning to children’s media content as a means of generating secure and dependable revenue over the long term. Despite the increasing dominance of children’s media properties within contemporary franchised media economies, the field of adaptation studies has remained reluctant to engage with children’s media culture and its products, leaving the discussion to fall into the hands of scholars of children’s literature, wherein the field’s well-documented distrust of commercial media forms and products conspires to occlude any discussion of adaptation’s industrial underpinnings.

This dissertation seeks to intervene from within this aporia. Combining research from the field of media industry studies with theory from the fields of adaptation studies, intermediality studies, and childhood studies, this dissertation will explore how twenty-first century adaptations of children’s media properties are predicated upon the logic of what this dissertation will refer to as “intergenerational synergy”. Employing a “meta-adaptive” (See Voigts-Virchow 2009; 2014) approach, this dissertation will examine how discourses of adaptation intersect with discourses of childhood across a selection of twenty-first-century adaptations of children’s media properties – including Walt Disney Pictures’ live-action remakes (2014-present), the films of the LEGO Movie franchise (2014-2019), Netflix’s Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events series (2017-2019); the augmented reality mobile game Wizards Unite (2019), and Mackenzi Lee’s Where Mischief Lies (2019) and the novels of the DC Icons (2017-present) and Twisted Tales (2015-present) series. Adopting what Herbert et. al refer to as the “textual” approach to media industry studies, I will illuminate how discourses of adaptation and discourses of childhood have been impacted by the ongoing convergence of the media industries (Jenkins 2006; Holt 2011; Hesmondhalgh 2019) and in the process demonstrate how adaptations are repeatedly deployed as means of creating commercial kinships between child and adult tastes, subjectivities, and cultures within this context. The end goal of this process is the remediation of the life-course itself as an experience of repetition and variation akin to that which defines adaptation (Hutcheon 2013[2006]; Elliott 2020).

By demonstrating how intergenerational synergies are cultivated across twenty-first century media franchises, this project promises to shed important light not only on the role that adaptation as process, product, and industry plays in the construction of childhood as a cultural commodity, but on the role that the media industries play in the discursivisation of age more broadly, and how these discourses are increasingly employed to cultivate young audiences media literacies in service to the imperatives of franchised media production.