If there’s one lesson we’ve learned this summer, it’s that just because Hollywood wants to make a sequel doesn’t mean audiences actually give a damn. Everything in the entertainment industry seems to want to be a franchise nowadays, turning a motion picture that made money once into a series of events that bring fans – and their money – coming back year after year. But although certain movie franchises seem to be doing just fine and dandy – Transformers and the Marvel Cinematic Universe certainly don’t seem to be losing any steam – other motion pictures are falling by the wayside, hemorrhaging money or simply underperforming despite having what studios seem to believe is a built-in audience.
Case in point, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, a sequel to a cult favorite with many vocal fans who seemed to want a sequel, completely tanked at the box office this weekend, coming in eighth place and making a lot less money than If I Stay, a teen weepie with no audience familiarity. Heck, it even came in behind the second weekend gross of The Expendables 3, another movie franchise everyone assumes is on its way out. Both series feature all-star casts in situations the filmmakers assumed audiences would want to see, full of violence and mania and style. So what the heck happened?
It’s difficult for Hollywood to let go. Sometimes they get so wrapped up in the idea of a franchise that they lose track of just how little people actually to see it continue. Sometimes the fans who actually do want another installment of Ghostbusters or Bill and Ted are just so vocal that they disguise the fact that many audience members don’t really care one way or another. Maybe they’ll see the movie, maybe they won’t, but they’re not exactly clamoring for another Die Hard no matter how much the studio wants to keep their tentpole series alive.
So let’s help Hollywood out. We’ve put together a list of 10 Movie Franchises We Don’t Want Anymore. Maybe we’ll jump back on board if the next sequel is totally awesome, maybe we’ll see another installment if there’s nothing else playing at the multiplex, but these are the movie series we just don’t get excited about anymore. We don’t yearn for them, we don’t salivate at the thought of seeing the protagonist’s adventures continue. If they give up or reboot the series altogether, we won’t give a damn.
Hollywood, you can give it rest now. You don’t need to make any more of these.
Slideshow: 10 Movie Franchises We Don’t Want Anymore
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
11 Movie Franchises That Should Be Put Out of Their Misery
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Die Hard (1988-2013)
The instant classic action movie Die Hard led to one mediocre sequel and one really great follow-up, but that's where it should have ended. The 21st century installments Live Free or Die Hard and A Good Day to Die Hard were exactly the kind of generic action crap the first movie subverted with clever writing and an everyman hero. This franchise became everything it used to despise. It should have died long ago.
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Indiana Jones (1981-2008)
The first three Indiana Jones movies - Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade - were all dashing and inspired pulp throwbacks with iconic action sequences and unforgettable scenes. After a nearly two decade sabbatical, Dr. Jones finally returned with the train wreck called Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, exhausting our good will and proving that Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and even Harrison Ford had lost sight of what really made the franchise special. The breathless inspiration had given way to goofy monkey chases and nonsensical plotting. If that's what they think audiences wanted, they simply shouldn't bother making any more.
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Machete (2007-2013)
Sin City isn't the only Robert Rodriguez series that needs to be put out of its misery. The original fake trailer for Machete in the cult classic Grindhouse was glorious, and it was pretty funny that he turned it into an actual, reasonably watchable feature film in the first place. The sequel, Machete Kills, was a cheap mess filled with pointless cameos and one pointless storyline after another. Robert Rodriguez clearly thinks that making Danny Trejo an action star is a lot funnier than it actually is. (And while we're at it, knock it off with all the Spy Kids sequels too.)
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Men in Black (1997-2012)
Barry Sonnenfeld's original Men in Black was a witty and unexpected sci-fi comedy that completely sold out with the product placement-infested and utterly forgettable Men in Black II. The third film was a marked improvement, but resorted to dumb time travel jokes left over from the Austin Powers sequels, and spent more time looking backwards than taking the franchise in anything resembling a new direction. The Men in Black movies were stuck in a rut from the very beginning, so let's just leave them there.
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Pirates of the Caribbean (2003-2017)
The first Pirates of the Caribbean took an already entertaining tale of piracy and the supernatural and plunked an unexpectedly bizarre leading man into the middle of it. The result was entertaining as hell and box office gold, but even though the sequels made money, they quickly flew off the rails, with the filmmakers incorrectly assuming the rest of the movie had to be just as hard to comprehend as Jack Sparrow himself. With Jack now at the center of the action, the Pirates franchise has lost its vital sense of contrast, and although the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales may very well be fun to watch, it's very hard to get excited about it. Thar, now she kinda blows.
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Sherlock Holmes (2009-2011)
Robert Downey Jr. and Guy Ritchie teamed up for a temporarily daring retread of the world's greatest detective in 2009's Sherlock Holmes, recasting the erudite hero as a street brawling cad. The first film was kinda fun, and so was the second, but the attitude was more memorable than the stories themselves and they've both been overshadowed by the BBC's sexier - and much more intelligent - TV reboot starring Benedict Cumberbatch. He's this generation's Sherlock. The franchise was fun while it lasted, but we don't really care about this version of Sherlock any more.
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The Amazing Spider-Man (2012-2018)
Although Marc Webb's reboot of the Spider-Man movie franchise has its fans, it clearly doesn't have as many as the Sam Raimi movies. Both of the new Amazing Spider-Man movies made significantly less money that any of the original films (which came out when tickets were slightly cheaper and 3D wasn't even boosting their box office numbers). With Sony turning The Amazing Spider-Man 2 into a feature length coming attraction for spin-offs instead of an actual movie that makes sense or works dramatically in its own right, we can't muster any interest in future installments. It's a marketing ploy with a great cast, all of whom deserve to be in better Spider-Man films. Sadly, we simply have no faith that better films are actually on the way.
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The Expendables (2010-2014)
Although everyone loves the idea of big name action stars teaming up for one great big adventure, that's never what we got with the Expendables movies. Every film shoved its stars into a lousy straight-to-video storyline instead of giving every actor something to work with and a plotline worth giving a damn about. The Expendables could have been a Magnificent Seven or Guns of Navarone for a new generation. Instead, this franchise is actually getting kind of embarrassing for everyone involved. They look more fun to make than they are to watch, so we don't really want to watch them anymore.
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The Hangover (2009-2013)
The first Hangover was an unpredictable comedy sensation, a blockbuster yuckfest with likable characters in unlikely situations. The first sequel was just more of the same, and The Hangover III was an unsuccessful experiment in breaking out of that mold. We long ago came to the conclusion that lightning only struck once. You can't turn a high-concept comedy into a franchise by pretending the joke gets funnier by repeating it over and over again.
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The Lord of the Rings (2001-2014)
The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a groundbreaking masterpiece of action, adventure and fantasy, but turning the shortest book in the series into its own trilogy of films has tested our patience and now, even though we still go see them, we're really only going out of a subconscious need to finish what we started. There are still moments of wonder but also so much padding that it's become entirely obvious that they're only making this many movies to bilk us out of as much cash as they possibly can. Hollywood, if you're thinking of doing The Silmarillion next, don't. You went there. It's time to go back again.
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The X-Files (1998-2008)
"The X-Files" may very well be the defining TV series of the 1990s, a smart episodic paranoid thriller that helped shape the America's cynical post-modern mythology. But it's never translated to the big screen. The first X-Files movie was just a decent double-sized episode of the TV show with more money and a cuss word thrown in just because they could, and the The X-Files: I Want to Believe was an outright bad double-sized episode of the TV show with a forgettable done-in-one storyline that contributed nothing to the lore of the franchise. If Fox ever wants to reboot this series altogether as a TV series we might be willing to give it a shot, but as far as we're concerned, the adventures of Mulder and Scully don't need to continue any longer. We wanted to believe, but they just didn't give us a reason to do so.
