Franchise Zombies in Live-Action Films.
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Real Life
- Highlander certainly fits the bill. Going from a cult classic film with a self-contained ending (the writers wriggled out this one by simply retconning everything), to a series of awesomely terrible sequels, TV spin-offs, cartoons and video games (only Highlander: The Series gets a pass from fans). One might argue that it was the least desired "franchise" of all time. There's also a lot of mixed feelings toward Bill Panzer, the producer of Highlander who died in 2007. On the one hand, Highlander was definitely his baby: Panzer was very active in the franchise's fan circuit, and even appears in the DVD featurettes while revisiting old shooting locations from the TV show. The man clearly cared a lot about the Highlander 'verse and wanted it to succeed. On the other hand, his zeal in pushing for more, more, more Highlander was likely motivated by profit. By the time Highlander: The Source came around, all artistic merit had been drained from the series and nobody had a clue how to prolong the story. There's some hope that a Continuity Reboot may infuse some merit into the live-action corner of the franchise again.
- Planet of the Apes. Beneath the Planet of the Apes ends with an Earth-Shattering Kaboom that would prevent further sequels. Charlton Heston specifically requested this ending so he wouldn't have to do any more movies (he made two brief appearances in the sequel primarily as a "thank you" to 20th Century Fox). The third, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, uses time travel to continue in the present day instead of After the End, and had an ending that was originally only envisioned as a connection to the original movie instead of a Sequel Hook... but it then led to two more sequels (with the fifth being the absolute worst
). And to make matters worse, the studio slashed the budget for every new movie! Only after the fifth movie bombed did Fox finally consent to Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain, so to speak. Of course, that didn't stop the franchise from continuing on TV (and eventually, returning to theaters with a remake, and then a reboot trilogy loosely based on Conquest and Battle but much better received). - Francis Ford Coppola had no intention of making any sequels to The Godfather. It's typically said that the only reason he made The Godfather Part II was to get the funding to make Apocalypse Now, which led to further executive pressure and a The Godfather Part III as well (hence the often-quoted line "Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in."). Part III in particular was not even intended to be a direct sequel—Coppola is on record for saying the film—which was originally titled The Death of Michael Corleone—was intended to be an epilogue to the first two films, as opposed to being a third Godfather installment.
- The sixth entry in The Pink Panther franchise, Revenge of the Pink Panther, was essentially commissioned by United Artists just to have a big film for summer 1978. By the time it was done, the long-strained working relationship between Peter Sellers (Inspector Clouseau) and Blake Edwards (writer-director) had snapped. Sellers planned a continuation he could put his heart into with Romance of the Pink Panther, which he was co-scripting and Edwards was paid not to participate in, but the project died along with Sellers in 1980. Edwards decided to continue the series himself with a Replacement Scrappy character in Curse of the Pink Panther, which flopped instantly and led to the original franchise's death.
- ZAZ has made it quite clear that they had no part or interest in the Airplane! sequel (in the first one's DVD commentary, they admit they've never even seen it), thinking that all of the good ideas had been used. Indeed, half the jokes in the sequel were recycled from the first film.
- When his father died suddenly in 1956, Leo Gorcey decided he could no longer continue with the Bowery Boys movie series. (His father Bernard Gorcey played sweet shop owner Louie Dumbrowski in those movies.) The fact that Gorcey had top billing in the movies didn't prevent Republic from continuing the series, replacing Gorcey with Stanley Clements. The series limped along with seven flat movies before ending two years later.
- Halloween:
- John Carpenter, in a 1982 interview, stated that Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis both died at the end of Halloween II (1981) and that he intended to make the series into an anthology "like The Twilight Zone but on a larger scale." After the financial flop of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Carpenter opted out of doing any more and signed away the rights to producer Moustapha Akkad, who quickly revived the original formula. Michael Myers went on to appear in five more films after his canon death, not counting the remakes.
- Rob Zombie expressed disappointment at the studio's initial plans to resurrect Michael for a third remake film, despite his insistence that his Halloween II was the end of the franchise. In Rob's case, it ended up being a zigzagged trope, as although another Halloween was eventually greenlit, it's an alternate sequel to the original film, with no connection to the remakes.
- Wes Craven wanted A Nightmare on Elm Street to be a single movie. Then when he returned to co-write the third film, he wanted that to be the last.
- Jaws had three unremarkable sequels. The book's author Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg had nothing to do with them (Benchley traded the potential sequel rights — "I don't care about sequels; who'll ever want to make a sequel to a movie about a fish?" — for cash payments; and Spielberg stated that "making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick", though Spielberg later admitted that he could have done Jaws 2 if he hadn't had a horrible time with the first). Lebeaus Le Blog even said Jaws: The Revenge Stopped Numbering Sequels because "the studio wanted to hide the fact that ''Jaws: The Revenge'' was the fourth film in a franchise that never needed a second film."
- Lethal Weapon 4 was made six years after the previous installment, mainly because Warner Brothers was running into financial trouble and the Lethal Weapon series was just about the only Cash-Cow Franchise it could count on to deliver a good box office return, up until the smashing success of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. To its own credit, Lethal Weapon 4 is a rare case of divisive reactions instead of typical Fanon Discontinuity.
- An example regarding only the main actor: Roger Moore wanted to stop playing James Bond after For Your Eyes Only, because it was getting embarrassing at his age to be shown with such young women (in his final appearance in A View to a Kill, he was older than the mother of the actress who played the primary Bond Girl), but United Artists kept dragging him back for one more.
- The Poseidon Adventure was such a success that Irwin Allen decided it had to have a sequel, and commissioned the original book's author Paul Gallico to write a follow-up, even if it followed the movie's continuity due to a massive ending change (the novel has the Poseidon sinking, while the film ends with the ship capsized but still afloat). He died writing it, two years before Beyond the Poseidon Adventure hit book stores, and one prior to the badly-received movie adaptation.
- Saw:
- James Wan and Leigh Whannell wanted to end the series with the third film, closing the book on Jigsaw and Amanda by killing both of them off. However, with the first two films having been massive hits, producers Mark Burg and Oren Koules viewed the series as Lionsgate's first major franchise, and forced Whannell and the writers to make numerous changes to the film in order to leave the door open for further installments. Indeed, there were five more films planned afterwards, with a new killer taking up the Jigsaw mantle and Wan and Whannell only staying on as executive producers with no creative input. While these films vary between positive and negative general reception, most fans view them overall as a step down from the first three, and they had lower box office results than the third film's peak (although most still did better than the first film). The diminishing revenue of Saw VI led to the producers combining the last two planned films into one, resulting in the production and release of the original finale Saw 3D, which had a much better revenue.
- This was taken further when Jigsaw, which had a completely new production team, came out years later, seeking to re-launch the franchise. Although no direct follow-up to it has been made yet, it left door for another film, Spiral.
- The Terminator series was intended to end with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which conclusively finished off any chance of Skynet being brought into existence. James Cameron had interest in continuing, but no concrete ideas as he got busy with Titanic and the producers of T2 bought the franchise rights to make a third movie without him. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was one hell of a Contested Sequel, and yet made enough money to get people interested in making more - which unfortunately wasn't the case with the follow-ups Terminator Salvation, Terminator Genisys, and lastly Terminator: Dark Fate, all underperforming enough to kill planned sequels (and the last one, being the first to get Cameron's input as writer and producer, was supposed to finally get things back on track, only to be a Franchise Killer instead).
- While George Lucas did envision Star Wars as a nine-installment saga at a certain point, he eventually settled for just six films, with the prequel trilogy giving the original one a conclusive thematic endpoint. Then Disney bought Lucasfilm specifically to create a sequel trilogy.
- Clive Barker signed the Hellraiser story and character rights to the production company before the first film, not realizing what a great success it would be. Hellbound: Hellraiser II still followed a story Barker wrote. The five follow-ups, not at all, and Barker even got mad at seeing his name being used to market the Ash Can Copy Hellraiser: Revelations.
- The Jurassic Park franchise was never originally intended to be so. Only after the incredible success of the first film was it turned into a series (see the Jurassic Park example in the Literature subpage for further information). And now there are three more times Jurassic movies than novels, outliving the original author and deviating greatly from the books in numerous aspects, while still picking out bits and pieces to use as scenes in each movie at random. None of the movie sequels are considered as good as the original film, with general reception ranging from passable but still inferior for the fourth film, mixed opinions for the second and sixth entries, to just plain bad for the third (which was a Franchise Killer until the series was rebooted fourteen years later) and fifth entries. Not helping this is the perceived devolution from trying to portray the dinosaurs as semi-realistic animals and keeping the science grounded, to just another generic action blockbuster series that depicts the dinosaurs as plot-convenient movie monsters.
- Air Bud is a memorable family basketball comedy about a dog that just wants to play basketball. It also had a pretty good sequel that came out the following year. Every sequel after that is direct-to-video and just has Buddy taking on yet another sport. Worse yet is the Air Buddies spinoff series starring Buddy's Talking Animal offspring. They have not only replaced the Buddy character entirely, but with seven different films, it's very clear it's nothing but another cash-grab series. The spinoff series even has a spinoff of its own in the form of the Santa Paws films.
- There were more than twice as many Friday the 13th films after the one subtitled The Final Chapter (the fourth film in the franchise) than there were before it, such that it has become the butt of many jokes about sequelitis in the horror genre, many lampooning the fact that, from the sixth film onward, they literally brought Jason back as a Revenant Zombie. That said, the general consensus among fans is that, while the movies varied in quality before then, Friday's zombie period really started when New Line Cinema bought the rights to the franchise after it was killed by the eighth film, Jason Takes Manhattan, having done so entirely to make a crossover with A Nightmare on Elm Street. During the Development Hell of what would become Freddy vs. Jason, New Line released two standalone Friday films; the first one, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, is regarded as an In Name Only sequel and one of the worst films in the series, while the second one, Jason X, is more a parody of the franchise than a serious continuation.
- The Godzilla films were intended to be concluded with the 1968 Monster Mash Destroy All Monsters, set in the far future (of 1999), where the kaiju Big Bad King Ghidorah is finally killed and the monsters are all allowed to live out their days in peace. However, the box office success of the film led to a string of sequels (chronologically set before Destroy All Monsters) generally considered to be of significantly lower quality, even among the campy Showa Era films, beginning with the almost universally reviled All Monsters Attack, and the very wacky Godzilla vs. Hedorah, Godzilla vs. Gigan, and Godzilla vs. Megalon, although the last two films of the Showa Era, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla and Terror of Mechagodzilla are considered to be a little better, particularly due to the introduction of the popular villain Mechagodzilla. And of course we know the franchise didn't even stop there, and now Destroy All Monsters only represents the quarter-mark in the series.
- David Cronenberg only ever intended Scanners to be a single film (and it's amazing that film even saw the light of day, given its Troubled Production). Christian Duguay took over and made Scanners II: The New Order and Scanners III: The Takeover about a decade later. The protagonist of 2 is apparently the son of the protagonist of the first film, but that's where the connection ends; the third film onwards feature entirely unrelated characters. This spawned yet another duo of spinoff movies, Scanner Cop and Scanner Cop II. Exploding heads and dueling telepaths are clearly just too awesome not to milk it for all it's worth.
- The Amazing Spider-Man Series suffered from this. After the Spider-Man Trilogy, Sony wanted a fourth movie made specifically to keep the rights from reverting to Marvel Studios, but director Sam Raimi left because he felt he wasn't given enough time to make the movie he wanted. So Sony opted for a full Continuity Reboot, and used it as a launchpad for obvious attempts to copy the Marvel Cinematic Universe's formula for a Modular Franchise with the small selection of Spider-Man-related material that they have the rights to. But with diminishing returns for the franchise and a few reviews for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 essentially using "franchise fatigue" to refer to this very trope, Sony eventually decided to cut the Amazing series short and instead strike a deal with Marvel to have Spider-Man join the Marvel Cinematic Universe itself (though they're still trying to launch a separate Spider-Man-based franchise, starting with Venom, initially without the actual Spider-Man).
- The Home Alone series of films kept on being produced long after Chris Columbus, John Hughes, and Macaulay Culkin were involved, receiving a more negative critical and audience reception each time.
In-Universe
- Scream has the Stab series, a fictional film franchise that serves as an analogue to Scream within its universe. The first Stab movie was a fictionalized version of the events of the first Scream, and it's implied that Stab 2 (which is never seen) was based on those of Scream 2. However, after Scream 3, which saw Stab 3: Return to Woodsboro experience a violently Troubled Production, Sidney Prescott sued the producers of Stab to prevent any further use of the characters they had by that point. Unfazed, they continued on anyway with a new cast, and by Scream 4 there have been seven Stab films of declining quality, the series having dropped all pretense of being Based on a True Story; by the fifth film, they were throwing in Time Travel, and the seventh film (which is briefly seen at the beginning of Scream 4) opens with two characters watching the previous installment. In Scream (2022), it's mentioned that the eighth Stab tried something different, but the results (which included giving Ghostface a flamethrower) wound up massively disliked. It got to the point that the film's killers are a pair of Loony Fans slicing up Woodsboro so their killing spree can inspire a Stab movie hewing closer to the old ones.
- Tropic Thunder: The Scorcher action film series, starring Tugg Speedman, were once a top box office draw but are now a commercial and critical failure.
- Back to the Future Part II: In 2015, there's Jaws 19 ("This time, it's really REALLY personal"). Shark still looks fake, though.
- 22 Jump Street parodies this in the end credits gag, which features increasingly bizarre sequel ideas, from 23 Jump Street: Med School to 29 Jump Street: Sunday School (in which Jonah Hill leaves and is replaced by Seth Rogen) to 2121 Jump Street (Recycled In Space).
- A newscast seen within Spaceballs promises a review of Rocky 5000. While Spaceballs never quite establishes whether it's in the future or "a long time ago," it's a safe bet that 5000 movies in, the original creators are no longer the ones in charge.
