Fandom vs. Audience: How Creators Keep a Franchise Alive Between Releases

In March 2023, all four Hunger Games films landed on Netflix for a 30-day window. The last one had left theaters eight years earlier. Within weeks, TikTok was full of Katniss and Peeta again- fan edits, symbolism breakdowns, “what I’d do in the arena” sketches. Fans called it the Hunger Games Renaissance. Nobody had to explain the world to anyone. The fandom had kept it warm the whole time.

The power is in the world that the fandom builds. And in the years between installments, creators are the ones keeping the lights on in Panem.

An audience rents the world. A fandom lives in it.

An audience is everyone who buys a ticket on opening weekend. A fandom is the smaller group that rewatches, rereads, theorizes, cosplays and argues about it for years. Studios need both, but they behave very differently.

Audiences arrive with a release and drift away after it. Fandoms stay through the gaps, and the gaps are getting longer. A blockbuster now takes years to make, and many franchises space installments three, five or eight years apart. A franchise doesn’t stay valuable in those years by going quiet. It survives because a community keeps talking about it.

That community is a business asset. Fans drive rewatches, book sales and merch, and they’re the first wave of pre-sales when the next film is announced. When a studio comes back after the gap, the fandom decides whether it walks into a room that’s warm or one that’s gone cold.

Eight years in Panem, with no new movie

Mockingjay – Part 2 closed out the original saga in 2015. The next film, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, didn’t arrive until November 2023. That’s eight years without a new movie, and the fandom never left.

When Lionsgate put the original films on Netflix in March 2023, the goal was clear. Motion Picture Group chair Joe Drake told The Wrap the move was meant to build excitement and book sales ahead of the prequel. The window was limited to 30 days, which created urgency to watch. All four films cracked Netflix’s daily Top 10.

But the streaming deal only opened the door. Creators walked through it. TikTok creators like @luckyleftie broke down symbols, themes and tiny details from the books and films, and new viewers binged the series to keep up. By May 2023, #thehungergames had passed 3.5 billion views on TikTok. A franchise that had been quiet for nearly a decade was trending again, months before its next release.

The pattern repeated for Sunrise on the Reaping. The novel came out on March 18, 2025, and the film opens November 20, 2026, a 20-month gap filled with fan casting, theories and countdowns. Fans had wanted Haymitch’s story for years, and it showed. The book sold 1.5 million copies worldwide in its first week, the series’ biggest opening ever. That’s more than double Ballad‘s first week in the U.S. and triple Mockingjay‘s. The fandom didn’t just wait. It grew.

What fans make that studios can’t

A studio can release a trailer. It can’t release 10,000 theories. Fan creators fill the gap years with content no marketing department could make- and no audience would trust if it did.

None of it needs a release date. It runs on community, and it compounds. Each new fan who discovers the world through a creator becomes a ticket buyer when the next installment opens.

Studios are designing for the gaps

The Hunger Games shows what a fandom can do through a long silence. Other studios are working to make the silence shorter, or to fill it on purpose.

Shrinking the gap. DC Studios is building a steady cadence around its rebooted universe. Superman opened in July 2025. Supergirl followed in June 2026, Clayface in September 2026, and Man of Tomorrow is set for July 2027. With a film or series arriving every few months, fans spend the time between releases connecting characters, tracking set photos and theorizing about what links one story to the next.

Inviting fans in. In August 2026, Disney and TikTok announced a deal that gives creators access to clips and assets from hundreds of Disney films and series. Fan videos from creators who opt in will appear inside Disney+, and a tiered Disney Creator Ambassador Program will reward standout creators. Disney said the goal is to give subscribers more to watch between new episodes and movie releases. Its chief marketing officer, Asad Ayaz, put it simply: “The best storytellers are fans first.”

The scale explains why. TikTok says fans post an average of 6.5 million film- and TV-related videos every day. That conversation is happening whether studios join it or not.

A fandom isn’t a marketing channel

Here’s the hard part: fandoms don’t take direction. The same community that keeps a franchise alive will also leak set photos, spread spoilers and build theories the next film has to live up to. Fan canon can harden into expectation, and a fandom that feels ignored or talked down to will say so loudly.

That’s a real risk, and it’s why heavy-handed approaches backfire. Fans can tell when a studio is borrowing their voice instead of listening to it. A scripted “fan moment” or an over-polished brand tie-in can land as the opposite of what it was meant to be.

The studios that get this right treat fandom as a relationship, not a channel. They share access, respect the lore and let creators speak in their own voice. They also listen, because a fandom in the gap years is the best early signal of what the next installment needs to deliver.

The opportunity

Sunrise on the Reaping opens November 20. With no next installment announced, the next gap starts the day after. What happens in Panem between now and whatever comes next will depend, once again, on the fans.

For studios, the gap years are no longer downtime. They’re a phase of the release calendar in their own right. The franchises that hold their value treat them that way:

For creators, the gap years are where you earn a place in the world. The fan creators studios notice share a few traits:

At IZEA, our Media & Entertainment team helps studios and streamers keep franchises alive between releases, by finding the fandoms and the creators who already carry them. Audiences show up for a release. Fandoms never leave.

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