He studied film at The University of Southern California alongside other notable directors George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis and John Carpenter.

Franklin's next film was the cult horror movie Patrick (1978), written by Everett De Roche, about a man in a coma who uses telekinesis to create murder and mayhem in a hospital.

Filmed and set in Australia, and starring American actors Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis (the latter of whom Franklin met whilst visiting his one-time USC classmate John Carpenter on the set of The Fog), Roadgames was the most expensive Australian movie ever made at the time of its release in 1981.

The film was a financial success and received generally good reviews (it also led to a further two sequels, neither of which Franklin was involved with).

The film was a remake of The Window (1949), which was in turn based on the short story "The Boy Who Cried Murder" by Cornell Woolrich (Woolrich's short story "It Had to Be Murder" was adapted into Hitchcock's Rear Window, which was the inspiration for Franklin's Road Games).

Franklin was going to make The Lost Boys at one stage[5] but his next film was Link (1986) a British horror movie (starring Elisabeth Shue and Terence Stamp) about a super-intelligent, murderous orangutan.

Franklin was disillusioned with Hollywood after the experience of directing the 1991 action/thriller FX2: The Deadly Art of Illusion (starring Bryan Brown and Brian Dennehy).(why?)