10 Dumb Mistakes That Ruined Once Great Franchises
Turns out "it worked before, so we don't have to try this time" isn't a great way to make a movie.
In modern Hollywood, there's nothing more unoriginally exciting than a franchise. They're the king of the box office; what a studio does unless they've suddenly decided they don't make money.
And everyone gets caught up in it; every time a new wunderkind director comes along, the immediate question is either "Will you do a sequel?" "Which franchise are you going to jump on board with?" Even Adam Wingard, the subversive horror director who'd made a name for himself sending up genre, turned to Blair Witch after his previous, The Guest, didn't quite excel at the box office.
But they're not infallible, never-ending conveyor belts of money. While the word "sure thing" is banded around a lot, when you've got hundreds of millions of dollars on the line and a bad word from an actor is the difference between success and failure, there's always a risk of massive loss. As we've seen this summer, plenty of projects marketing execs gave a thumbs up while dollar signs blinded them wound up being bombs, likely ending many emergent franchises.
So yeah, franchises may be the studios' go-to, but that doesn't mean any old series is a guaranteed gold mine. And it's not reserved to "wait, why the f*ck did they do that?" movies like Independence Day: Resurgence either; things audiences once loved can very quickly go sour. Just look at the long list of once-great franchises that crumbled based on just a single, shoddy decision.
10. Splitting The Final Book In Two - The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games was the closest thing a franchise can be to the fire emoji; instantly understood, widely used and the right level of establishment cool.
Then they split the final book, Mockingjay, in two. Fair play, this had worked wonders with Harry Potter, the previous cross-generation teen fiction craze, but all respect to Katniss, she ain't no Boy Who Lived. And even if she was, Francis Lawrence's approach to the split repeated the same mistakes as David Yates, only worse; he claimed it was to better tell the story, only to insert so much extraneous action that the actually important plot turns had to be rushed through at the last minute with no time to let the emotion sit.
This single choice, more than any other issue - turning something so unique and zany into an Aliens riff, the questionable handling of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's death - is what's hurt The Hunger Games' legacy. The reception to both parts of Mockingjay was considerably muted, and by the time Part 2 came around the amount of people coming out to see the actual movie was considerably down.
It fared a little better than Divergent, however, whose first instalment of book three proved so lacklustre the final part was downgraded to a TV movie, with none of the key actors wanting to return.