8 Movie Franchises That Should Have Quit While They Were Ahead

Like Columbo on the hunt for clues or your drunk mate twenty minutes before the last train home, Hollywood just can't resist saying "just one more". A major franchise can be well past its prime, with quality, box office and audience interest in the decline, but if there's a little more green to be squeezed out of an IP, you can bet they'll fast track a back-to-back sequel trilogy in a heartbeat.

The results are rarely pretty. Yes, studios may end up getting a little bit more cash, but was it worth losing a series' reputation and retroactively tarring the view of the previous, genuinely great movies? In the following eight cases, definitely not.

Honourable Mentions

There's some obvious examples for this that I'd be remiss for not mentioning, but at the same time are so well covered a whole new entry would be a little bit reductive. These include:

Pirates Of The Caribbean - A surprisingly fun adventure yarn, the increasing focus on Johnny Depp's mugging and scaling up of the story made things incredibly sluggish and the prospect of the upcoming fifth movie exhausting.

Friday The 13th/A Nightmare On Elm Street/Halloween - The exact circumstances vary, but each of the 80s slasher trifecta ran on far too long, with increasingly out-there sequels and inexplicably worse remakes.

Die Hard - The first couple of sequels weren't all that bad, but as Bruce Willis started caring less, so too did the films fail in providing an exciting action experience.

Shrek - A once pleasant alternative to Disney, Shrek began to get lost in its own mythology and took itself far too seriously. Rumours of a fifth movie are not met with joy.

When It Should Have Quit: Saw III

It's easy to forget that the first Saw is actually really good. It's not blunt torture porn, but an extremely violent, low-budget mystery thriller that takes the idea of detectives hunting a "moral" killer from Se7en and makes it even more intense. Sprinkle in one of the best twist of the 2000s and it's hardly surprising its director is still one of the most crowd-pleasing presences in Hollywood today. The second one's not total dreck either, with some properly gruesome traps (I flinch just thinking of the needle pit) and a fairly cohesive plot. The third one... well the third one was where it started to turn, but it still managed to bring itself to a satisfying conclusion.

And by "conclusion" I do mean end - this is clearly meant to be the cap on a trilogy, with Jigsaw dying and major plot threads paid off. However, because by this point it has become a Halloween staple ("If it's Halloween, it must be Saw") instead it kept on going and going, with imitators vying for Jigsaw's legacy and increasingly sadistic traps with no moral centre. There's moments of merit in these, but for the most of part it's a lost cause.

It was a franchise for gore hounds and teenagers, and with that a defining horror went from lauded to a cheap-y hit of its time.