Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

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Ares
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Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

Post by Ares »

Franchises can be a funny thing. When something proves some flavor of successful, there's the natural idea of wanting to see more of it. After all, if this thing was great and made money, why not make more? If a movie did better than expected and was a hit with an audience, why not turn it into a franchise, make multiple movies in that film universe and milk it for all it's worth?

The problem is that some films lend themselves to franchises better than others. Some stories have enough to them that there's enough to explore for decades, while others work better as a one-and-done, perhaps a sequel or a trilogy, but no more.

Franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek have every right to be franchises. The expansive fictional universes have so much going on that you could tell stories in them for years to come. Granted, the staff of the last several years have been trying to kill both franchises, but that doesn't mean the storytelling potential for both settings doesn't exist.

Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones are two other franchises that work well. As long as you can come up with some new adventure for the heroes to go on, you could conceivably keep telling stories about them. Heck, Ghostbusters has had several animated series and comic books showcasing how much storytelling potential there is.

The Aliens and Predator films likewise have enough story potential to keep going, they've just dropped the ball with both franchises in the past decade or so.

But then you get films like Rocky, Jaws or Terminator. Rocky and Jaws, to my mind, work better as simple one-and-dones, because the longer those franchises went on, the more they turned into parodies of themselves. The Terminator franchise likewise should have stopped with Terminator 2, because that film tied up all of the loose ends and ended the story on a hopeful, positive note. Every film after T2 has either been a reboot or gone against the ending of the best film in the franchise, which was "there is no fate but what we make".

Highlander is kind of an interesting one, since the first movie basically fulfills its premise at the end of the movie, with all of the Immortals dead and Conner as The One. Yet at the same time, the Highlander TV series showed the story potential of a world full of Immortals. If anything, it shows that Highlander works better as a TV show than a film, as the films all immediately went bad.

So what do you guys think? Are there some franchises that should have just stopped earlier on? Are there some one-shot films that could have been full on franchises? Are there some franchises that could work but have just been mishandled at various points?
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Davies
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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

Post by Davies »

After having enjoyed the Bourne novels when I read them in high school, I quite enjoyed the way that The Bourne Identity moved the characters out of the early 80s and into the then-present. But I noped right out of the second movie, when they killed Bourne's love interest to motivate him, and nothing I've heard about any of the sequels has at all inspired me to go back. Likewise, the last Mission: Impossible movie that I watched was Abrams' one, and I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the first two.

There are plenty of films that had sequel hooks baked into them, like Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze and Flash Gordon. Setting aside any evaluation of the quality of these films, I think it's probably a good thing that neither inspired a franchise.

And no series of films in the western canon has lasted nearly as long as the fifty films of Japan's Otoko wa Tsurai yo/"Tora-san" series.
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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

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Man, thinking of Doc Savage makes me kind of depressed that the last good Pulp-style film I can really think of is the 1999 Mummy movie and it's sequel. And give that since then we've had an Indiana Jones movie, a John Carter of Mars movie, a Lone Ranger movie, a Green Hornet movie and more, that's just depressing as heck.
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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

Post by M4C8 »

Davies wrote: Sun Apr 26, 2020 7:25 am After having enjoyed the Bourne novels when I read them in high school, I quite enjoyed the way that The Bourne Identity moved the characters out of the early 80s and into the then-present. But I noped right out of the second movie, when they killed Bourne's love interest to motivate him, and nothing I've heard about any of the sequels has at all inspired me to go back. Likewise, the last Mission: Impossible movie that I watched was Abrams' one, and I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the first two.

There are plenty of films that had sequel hooks baked into them, like Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze and Flash Gordon. Setting aside any evaluation of the quality of these films, I think it's probably a good thing that neither inspired a franchise.

And no series of films in the western canon has lasted nearly as long as the fifty films of Japan's Otoko wa Tsurai yo/"Tora-san" series.
The Mission Impossible movies are great (the second one was the worse IMHO), the films following the Abrams one are really worth watching. It's one of the few franchises that most people say has got better throughout the years.
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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

Post by greycrusader »

Well, Taken is pretty much the definition of a move that should have been one and done, though I know the second and third were still fairly profitable for the studio and stars-I mean, maybe the guy just isn't meant to be a family man?. Then there's Die Hard, which went from an improbable cinematic action movie/thriller to a series about an aging superhero who can outrun explosions and aim cars at helicopters. And in the non-genre realm, Pitch Perfect should have ended on a high note, instead of playing out the same old song.

(yeah, okay I ended with a groaner, but so did Anna Kendrick and Co., ba-bump-dah!)

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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

Post by saint_matthew »

Film franchises that shouldn't have been franchises?

Fine i'll say it: The DC Cinematic Universe.

That things been an abortion since day 1. Even the movies people refer to as good are only good when compared to the movies that are terrible. Compare them to a legitimately good movie of yesteryear & you suddenly realise how far the quality for contemporary movie making has dropped in recent years.
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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

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I think the DCEU could have easily been as good as the MCU (though how long that'll last is anyone's guess), and deserves to be a franchise. But when you get Zack Snyder as the guy who sets the tone for the universe and then have people in charge who don't want to put the time and work Marvel did into building up said universe organically, you're going to wind up with crap.
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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

Post by Ken »

Highlander: the TV series, a good idea except for trying to justify both it and the movie co-existing. Roughly akin to saying there were two Hawkeye Pierces at M*A*S*H 4077, one that looked like Donald Sutherland and one who looked like Alan Alda.

Highlander the film series... THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!
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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

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Ah yes, Eyeliner: The Lengthening.

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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

Post by Woodclaw »

Since Ares already mentioned Terminator, I'm going out on a limb and put Robocop on the plate.

The original Robocop is a movie that I watched only years after its release and enjoy thoroughly. In many ways, it was a little cinematic masterpiece and none of the sequels ever managed to recapture the same feeling. Even the often praised second movie never worked for me.
Lots of people seem convinced that many of the flaws of the second movie boil down to the production team steering away from the original script by Frank Miller, but after reading Miller's take in comic-book format I disagree. One of the key points of the first movie was the internal conflict between the human instincts of Alex Murphy and the programming of Robocop, the entire final confrontation at the OCP's board of directors was essentially Murphy finding a way to waltz around the programming. This was a very powerful narrative tool that managed to establish how human ingenuity was the key tool in Murphy's arsenal, not his cybernetic enhancements.
The second movie turned this idea upsidedown, putting Murphy in a no-win scenario with so many barriers that his only option was to get electroshocked to reboot himself to factory state... I'm sorry, but this a terrible decision. In short, this writing decision made all of Murphy's struggles in the first movie meaningless, because flipping the table isn't the same as winning the game.
Subsequent entries in the franchise went ever more downward (I'm not counting the animated adaptations). The third movie was more or less harmless pop-corn entertainment. The 1993 TV series had a couple of good moments (like when Murphy met his father), but was overall a sugar-coated mess that lacked the punch of the original. Prime Directives (2001) tried to recover the spirit of the first movie and was actually a pretty interesting entry, despite lacking the black humor of the original.

I'm not going to touch the 2014 reboot, because I've not seen it.
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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

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Ken wrote: Tue Apr 28, 2020 11:30 am Highlander: the TV series, a good idea except for trying to justify both it and the movie co-existing. Roughly akin to saying there were two Hawkeye Pierces at M*A*S*H 4077, one that looked like Donald Sutherland and one who looked like Alan Alda.

Highlander the film series... THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!
1000000 % yes !
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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

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I agree that Robocop worms better as a stand-alone movie, or as a movie to launch a big budget TV series. There's plenty of story potential for Robocop, all the normal fun of an action police drama, but in a cyberpunk future with a superpowered cop. Plenty of stories there, just not the ones they chose to tell, since they tried to roll back some of the changes to Murphy.

The first Robocop is about someone whose life, his soul, was taken from him by tragedy and people who wanted to control him, and about the struggle to reclaim what he lost. When he says that his name is Murphy at the end, it signifies that he's gotten a big part of who he was back. Things from there should have been trying to adapt to what he is, now that he knows fully who he is.
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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

Post by kirinke »

Terminator.

It really should have ended at the first movie.
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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

Post by Scots Dragon »

Ken wrote: Tue Apr 28, 2020 11:30 am Highlander: the TV series, a good idea except for trying to justify both it and the movie co-existing. Roughly akin to saying there were two Hawkeye Pierces at M*A*S*H 4077, one that looked like Donald Sutherland and one who looked like Alan Alda.

Highlander the film series... THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!
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Ares
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Re: Film franchises that shouldn't have BEEN franchises

Post by Ares »

kirinke wrote: Wed Jun 03, 2020 5:07 pm Terminator.

It really should have ended at the first movie.
I think T-1 worked as a standalone film, but T-2 made the story come full circle, ended on a positive note, and wrapped things up nicely. Some things just work better as two-parter like that.

I honestly think they could tell Indiana Jones or Aliens stories forever, and even Robocop could work as the ongoing adventures of a cyberpunk cop, but Terminator just doesn't work in the same way.
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