YMMV / Three Bogatyrs

• Audience-Alienating Era: Even since the beginning of The New '10s, the quality of the films as whole started to decline in the eyes of viewers, with only some occasional exceptions popping up rarely. While Critical Dissonance keeps the disdain from being too widespread, it's very common to find those who believe that Three Bogatyrs franchise has gone long since its past glory with little creativity behind the recent production films.
• First Installment Wins: In the eyes of many, the three first films (which were standalone and barely intertwined with each other) are seen as the best in the whole franchise, though some prefer to include the first crossover as well.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • One of the most discussed problems with the recent films is Julius and Duke of Kyiv constantly taking the major spotlight from the titular Bogatyrs and most of the time shoving them into a barely relevant subplot which is dropped halfway through anyway. The same thing could be traced back to the 2000's, but it was not as glaring as it is now due to different approaches to each character and how they initially worked.
    • Julius had a rough start as a Token Evil Teammate of Alyosha, not even being willingly dragged in the first adventure, yet he had a lot of charm and came off as a Love to Hate Jerk with a Heart of Gold at worst than at ouright villain. In addition, the main focus was still on Alyosha and his friends, putting Julius on the background and keeping him from affecting the story too much. Even his second appearance in the first crossover, How to Not Rescue a Princess, was tolerable since not only did Julius come back after being Put on a Bus, but the main action was still devoted to the Bogatyrs. But starting from Three Heroes on Distant Shores, Julius began to get more focus on top of coming as more likeable and endearing to the audience, becoming a Breakout Character enough to receive his own spinoff film, which didn't even hide him being the central point of focus and put the three Bogatyrs in the background subplot for most part, not even including them in the film's very title.
    • Meanwhile, Duke of Kyiv was not even supposed to be sympathetic in the earlier installments. He appeared in the Alyosha Popovich and Tugarin Zmey as a one-shot minor antagonist, then was a part of the Big Bad Duumvirate in Dobrynya Nikitich and Zmey Gorynych and unwittingly caused the plot of Ilya and The Robber. Yet he still got a taste of karma in each film^note being threatened with the captured Tugarin, having his own debt used against him and having to retrieve the gold he lost to The Robber, respectively, with the third one even having him take a level in badass, which won him a lot of fans. Even the first crossover completely justified his involvement in the plot due to him having been Brainwashed and Crazy by the Big Bad. But again, from Three Heroes on Distant Shores, his tendency of breaking things and having someone else restore them for him became much harder to ignore to the point of becoming Duke's defining trait. It doesn't help that for all his unwitting troublemaking he at most gets called out by heroes, not even receiving any real karma afterwards because Status Quo Is God.
  • Speaking of the Bogatyrs being shoved aside, more recent installments have them take little part in the plot itself, instead wandering off somewhere for their own reasons rather than their duty to the homeland. While it was no stranger back in the very first installments (such as Alyosha initially setting off alone to clear his name before being joined by his companions), it worked mostly due to the Bogatyrs themselves staying in-character and still having their actions be tied to the main plot. But when Julius and Duke of Kyiv became Breakout Characters, they started to get more focus with each subsequent film, whereas the Bogatyrs were demoted to their own subplots, most of which have little to do with the actual plot until the end of the film. It gets especially ridiculous when they don't even participate directly in the final cofrontation of Three Heroes and the Horse on the Throne, only appearing to intimidate the antagonists into cutting their losses at the very end. Subsequently, many started to assume it will be only a matter of time before the titular trio becomes The Artifact of their own franchise.