The WAG Pipeline: Building the World and the Audience Before You Build the Game

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The WAG Pipeline: Building the World and the Audience Before You Build the Game

The current approach to building game-anchored transmedia universes remains stubbornly elusive and often results in commercial failure due to misaligned business realities and late-stage integration. This article introduces the WAG Pipeline (World, Audience, Game), which is a progressive model that flips the traditional development pressure by building an audience and world first, gathering honest signals, and only greenlighting a major game investment when success is audience-backed. This risk-smart strategy treats community as a core system and allows IP to grow organically, ensuring that when the game finally arrives, its immersion is amplified by an invested audience. Discover how this approach relocates risk to stages where originality can breathe, guaranteeing that studios learn cheaply and with a compass.

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OSCARS WATCH 2026—“Some Achieve Greatness”: Shakespeare, the Prestige Mediator in 'Hamnet'

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OSCARS WATCH 2026—“Some Achieve Greatness”: Shakespeare, the Prestige Mediator in 'Hamnet'

This piece is part of a series of critical responses based on the films nominated for the 98th Academy Awards. In this contribution, Lauren Sowa considers recent commentary around the popularity of opera and theatre compared with film through a focus on Shakespeare and Hamnet.

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OSCARS WATCH 2026—One Allusion After Another: Paul Thomas Anderson as Cinephile and Curator in ‘One Battle After Another’

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OSCARS WATCH 2026—One Allusion After Another: Paul Thomas Anderson as Cinephile and Curator in ‘One Battle After Another’

This piece is part of a series of critical responses based on the films nominated for the 98th Academy Awards. In this contribution, Tara Lomax explores how Paul Thomas Anderson uses the New Hollywood allusionism in One Battle After Another to invoke signification and expression in the film through cinephiles and curation.

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OSCARS WATCH 2026—It’s Not an Accident: Restrictions Informing Stylistic Choices in Jafar Panahi’s 'It Was Just an Accident'

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OSCARS WATCH 2026—It’s Not an Accident: Restrictions Informing Stylistic Choices in Jafar Panahi’s 'It Was Just an Accident'

This piece is part of a series of critical responses based on the films nominated for the 98th Academy Awards. In this contribution, Melanie Robson analyses how elements in director Jafar Panahi's cinematic approach that were once only a practical response to restrictions—filming in vehicles, working in small crews, and prioritising rural over urban locations—have cemented themselves in his style. In It Was Just an Accident, which is nominated for Best International Film, they don’t feel like limitations but choices that enrich the film’s visual presentation. 

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OSCARS WATCH 2026—'F1' and Persisting Assumptions of Quality

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OSCARS WATCH 2026—'F1' and Persisting Assumptions of Quality

This piece is part of a series of critical responses based on the films nominated for the 98th Academy Awards. In this contribution, Duncan McLean reflects on F1: The Movie being nominated for Best Picture and how this provokes persistent assumptions about quality associated with the Oscars.

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OSCARS WATCH 2026—Thoughts on the Oscars from Someone Who Wrote a Book About Them

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OSCARS WATCH 2026—Thoughts on the Oscars from Someone Who Wrote a Book About Them

This piece is part of a series of critical responses based on the films nominated for the 98th Academy Awards. In this commentary piece, Robert Boucaut about the Oscars 2026 season, building from threads of his recent monograph Oscar Bait: The Academy Awards & Cultural Prestige (2025, Routledge). It considers the relevance of the Oscars for audiences in today’s attention and money economies. Alongside opinions on this year’s nominees, Boucaut underline points of interest in films and performances echoing the continuing tensions or narratives of recent Oscars.

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GLOBAL GENRES—Genre Mixing and Spatiality in Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

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GLOBAL GENRES—Genre Mixing and Spatiality in Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

This post is part of a series of essays that emerged from Henry Jenkins’ doctoral seminar on global genres at the University of Southern California. In this contribution, Georgiana Yasumura considers how Kowloon Walled City (KWC, also known as the “city of darkness”) is its own independent character within Hong Kong media. KWC’s spatial presence across Hong Kong’s global mediascapes reveals more than a visually haunting, post-apocalyptic fortress; it also draws attention to issues of nationhood, personal liberation and social justice that are integral to the genre of cross-border film.

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GLOBAL GENRES—In the Light of Guilt: Transnational Noir and Moral Ambiguity in Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia

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GLOBAL GENRES—In the Light of Guilt: Transnational Noir and Moral Ambiguity in Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia

This post is part of a series of essays that emerged from Henry Jenkins’ doctoral seminar on global genres at the University of Southern California. In this contribution, Lauren Reel considers how nordic noir translates the darkness of film noir into lightness.

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GLOBAL GENRES—Thinking about Genre: What Makes a Movie “Religious”?

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GLOBAL GENRES—Thinking about Genre: What Makes a Movie “Religious”?

This post is part of a series of essays that emerged from Henry Jenkins’ doctoral seminar on global genres at the University of Southern California. In this contribution, Christian Pattavina employs ideas about genre to question what it means for films to be ‘religious’.

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GLOBAL GENRES—My Whole Bloody Affair: Why Kill Bill Vol. 1 is Punker than Kill Bill Vol. 2

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GLOBAL GENRES—My Whole Bloody Affair: Why Kill Bill Vol. 1 is Punker than Kill Bill Vol. 2

This post is part of a series of essays that emerged from Henry Jenkins’ doctoral seminar on global genres at the University of Southern California. In this contribution, Art Tavana explores Tarantino’s punk ethos in Kill Bill, Vol 1 and Kill Bill, Vol. 2 to argue that Vol. 1 is a joyfully punk distillation of Tarantino’s core gestures as a filmmaker: excess, repetition, pastiche, exploitation, and provocation.

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GLOBAL GENRES—Kaiju Connections: Disabled Ecologies, Visibility, the Posthuman, and Transnationality in Pacific Rim

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GLOBAL GENRES—Kaiju Connections: Disabled Ecologies, Visibility, the Posthuman, and Transnationality in Pacific Rim

This post is part of a series of essays that emerged from Henry Jenkins’ doctoral seminar on global genres at the University of Southern California. In this contribution, Joy Hannah Panaligan explores the relationship between the kaiju genre and disability in Pacific Rim (2013) by Guillermo del Toro, which veers away from traditional kaiju narratives of national trauma. This kaiju invasion instead demands collective, global action and cooperation, allegorizing universal problems like climate change. This post draws on Sunaura Taylor’s (2024) concept of disabled ecologies to map out how kaiju films can examine the invisible and visible “disabilities” embedded in human and non-human actors within the ecological system.

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GLOBAL GENRES—Introduction: Film Genre in the Age of the Global Shuffle

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GLOBAL GENRES—Introduction: Film Genre in the Age of the Global Shuffle

When a little more than a year ago I was invited to teach a course in film genre at the USC Cinema School, my first reaction was that I was born to teach a core class in American film genre. I could teach a class taking contemporary PhD students through the history of genre criticism and watch a mix of genre films – canonical and deep cuts, old and new.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the next wave of important work in genre theory would be coming through an engagement with the global production and circulation of genre films, the mutual influence of genre across the planet.  And so, without even fully knowing what I might mean by it, I proposed teaching a course on “film genre in the age of the global shuffle”.

Over the next few posts, Pop Junctions will share a collection of essays that emerged from this course. This post provides an introduction to this series of posts to provide context to the questions that continue to face genre studies today.

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Fandom as Consumer Collective: Christmas Trees as Fannish Display

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Fandom as Consumer Collective: Christmas Trees as Fannish Display

The post presents an excerpt from Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets’ recently released third book in the Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Consumer Collective. This extract considers the work of Daniel Miller which touches on questions of collecting and meaning-making through our relationship with “Stuff.” In honor of the holiday season, we focus on the ways that in an increasingly secular era, Christmas trees can become a site of fannish display and their decoration a process of recalling the stories of our lives.

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Frames of Fandom: An Excerpt From 'Fandom as Consumer Collective'

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Frames of Fandom: An Excerpt From 'Fandom as Consumer Collective'

Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the third book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Consumer Collective and the fourth book, Fandom as Subculture, will be published before the end of 2025.  Altogether, fifteen volumes have been planned in this series and are at various stages. The books are being self-published and print-on-demand on Amazon. This post provides an excerpt from the third book, which examines how consumer collectives overlap with, include, and also transcend subcultures and audiences to form a new type of social grouping, simultaneously engaged with and critical of consumer culture.

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“I May Be Circling the Drain But I Have a Few Steps in Me!’: Dick Van Dyke, ‘Mary Poppins’ and Playful Aging

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“I May Be Circling the Drain But I Have a Few Steps in Me!’: Dick Van Dyke, ‘Mary Poppins’ and Playful Aging

This blog post is based on remarks Henry Jenkins presented as a keynote speaker at The Older, The Better! Aging Celebrity in Contemporary Media and Sport Contexts, PRIN 2022 PNRR “Celebr-Age” Final Conference at Universita di Bologna in September.  He discusses legendary performer Dick Van Dyke's joyful aging vibrant characters in conjunction with Jenkins' own work as Van Dyke's 100th birthday approaches this December.

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IPDW2025—(Re)designing Production: An Interview with Alex McDowell

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IPDW2025—(Re)designing Production: An Interview with Alex McDowell

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this contribution, Tara Lomax asks Production Designer Alex McDowell about world-building, reimagining the production process, and his work across industry and education.

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IPDW2025—Minding Dreams

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IPDW2025—Minding Dreams

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this contribution, Academy Award-winning Production Designer Rick Carter shares a meditation on the nature of creativity as a practice of ‘dream minding’.

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IPDW2025—Storytelling Through Spaces: The Blood, Sweat, and Tears of Production Design

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IPDW2025—Storytelling Through Spaces: The Blood, Sweat, and Tears of Production Design

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this contribution, Mumbai-based Production Designer Shailaja Sharma reflects on the work of production design as a dynamic between creativity, labor, and logistics through two different projects: Gold (Excel Entertainment, 2018) and Dahaad (Amazon Prime Video, 2023).

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IPDW2025—Natural Realism in Production Design Through the Lens of ‘Watching You’ (2025–)

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IPDW2025—Natural Realism in Production Design Through the Lens of ‘Watching You’ (2025–)

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this contribution, Australian-based Production Designer Virginia Mesiti unpacks the craft of “natural realism”: a design approach that disappears into character, psychology, and place. The goal is not to create spectacle but to persuade; to build spaces so truthful that viewers forget they were ever designed.

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