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As promised 25 years ago the terminator is back. This time, in Terminator Salvation, aka Terminator 4, it’s the turn of Christian Bale to play John Connor, the leader of a rag-tag bunch of humans who battle a mighty machine army in a post-apocalyptic future world. It’s a preposterous if entertaining spectacle, full of explosions, bullet-ridden set pieces and corny one-liners (yes, Bale does get to say: “I’ll be back!”). But it’s also emblematic of the type of movie — the bigbudget franchise — that has come to dominate the Hollywood horizon.

The summer blockbuster season now stretches from April to September and beyond (Watchmen was released in March, Disney’s Up will be released in October). The industry itself is essentially funded by the enormous profits from box-office behemoths such as Star Trek, X-Men, Transformers and Batman. “The studios have undergone a conversion into franchise factories to the exclusion of all else,” says Steven Gaydos, the executive editor of the trade magazine Variety. “The whole corporate culture is geared towards delivering gigantic blockbusters.”

The movies that define these franchises are not even movies any more. “They are called product,” says Peter Bart, the former vice president of production at Paramount Pictures (he oversaw The Godfather and Rosemary’s Baby). “The studio has its assembly line and this is the product.”

And yet, as this product becomes ever more costly to make — the average franchise movie, including the marketing budget, is $300 million (£190 million) — its success becomes vital to the survival of the companies that make it and the entire studio system. “If two or three fail then you will find the studios under real pressure,” Gaydos says. So, with the fate of Tinseltown itself seemingly hanging in the balance, here are ten crucial rules for any prospective producer to achieve and maintain a healthy Hollywood franchise.

1 Reboot

The term “rebooting” is described by The Hollywood Reporter as “thawing out a dormant film franchise after years in deep freeze”. Mostly grittier, darker and less campy, the rebooted franchise is a conspicuous example of Hollywood doublethink — ie, the rebooted movie will be totally different, but the same.

Successfully rebooted franchises include the Batman movies, the recent Die Hard and Rocky instalments and, most obviously, the new and darker James Bond. “After all, how many submarines can you blow up? How many control rooms can you evaporate?” said Martin Campbell, the director of Casino Royale, about the seemingly radical rebooting of Bond. “The point is that this Bond is much more human than the other one!”

Even the Terminator franchise, though “dormant” for only five years, was badly in need of a reboot, according to Christian Bale. “I just kind of felt that the mythology was done,” he said at the movie’s LA premiere. “But I got excited by the idea of being able to recreate it and revive it. We ended up with something quite new.”

2 Prequelise

Batman did it, Star Trek did it, and it seems to be working just fine for Wolverine. Instead of catching up with our franchise hero in paunchy middle age (witness Rocky Balboa), and risk alienating the precious youth audience, we get a look at life before the original franchise, with younger actors and sexier plot lines (see the romping, raunchy cast of Star Trek).

Christopher Nolan, the director of the new Batman movies, has defended his decision to prequelise by pointing out that the original four-movie series had hit a creative impasse. “When Tim Burton made his film in 1989 it was a very stylised movie,” Nolan says. “And when you go down that road you’re going to hit a dead end.”

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