Question:

      What is Hollywood's Midas formula for making billion dollar franchises?

Answer:

These franchises, such as Spider-Man, Finding Nemo, Lord of the Rings, Harry Pottter and Pirates of the Carribean, share nine common elements:
1) they are based on children’s stories, comic books, serials, cartoons, or, as in the case of Pirates of the Carribean, a theme-park ride.
2) They feature a child or adolescent protagonist.
3) They have a fairy-tale-like plot in which a weak or ineffectual youth is transformed into a powerful and purposeful hero.
4) They contain only chaste, if not strictly platonic, relationships between the sexes, with no suggestive nudity, sexual foreplay, provocative language, or even hints of consummated passion.
5) They feature bizarre-looking and eccentric supporting characters that are appropriate for toy and game licensing.
6) They depict conflict– though it may be dazzling, large-scale, and noisy– in ways that are sufficiently nonrealistic, and bloodless, for a rating no more restrictive than PG-13.
7) they end happily, with the hero prevailing over powerful villains and supernatural forces most of which remain available for potential sequels).
8) They use conventional or digital animation to artificially create action sequences, supernatural forces, and elaborate settings.
9) They cast actors who are not ranking stars– at least in the sense that they do not command gross-revenue shares. (For his role in Spider-Man, Tobey Maguire, for example, though he was a well-established actor, received only $4 million and a share of only “net profits,” (which do not divert from the revenues flowing into the studios' clearinghouses).