8 Movie Sequels That Ruined A Perfect Franchise Ending
Franchises that just didn't know when to stop.
Perfect endings are few and far between in storytelling. One need look no further than the rabid hatred inspired by the final season of Game of Thrones this past year to see just how difficult it is for a work of fiction to truly nail an ending that is both fitting and climactically satisfying.
What is even more frustrating than a flubbed ending for a franchise, though, is when a franchise nails the perfect ending, only for that it to be completely undone in a subsequent sequel. To have seen the storytellers go to such lengths to end a franchise on a high note, only for little more than a few money-hungry producers or studio execs to pump out another installment and tarnish the name of the whole franchise in the process is undeniably depressing. Yet is seems to happen all of the time.
These are the most infamous cases in cinema history of a franchise landing a near-perfect ending, only for another sequel to come along and ruin the entire thing.
8. X-Men: Apocalypse
After years of haphazardly limping along as a franchise, Fox's X-Men franchise seemed to finally get its sh*t together in 2014. Tying together the previously separate narrative threads of the original trilogy, X-Men: First Class, and even James Mangold's The Wolverine, X-Men: Days of Future Past acted as a culminating and ridiculously satisfying culmination for the series as a whole.
So, of course, they had to go and ruin it.
Part of what made Days of Future Past so satisfying to long-time franchise fans was the way it cleared the stage, essentially creating a whole new narrative universe full of potential stories with its various time-traveling antics. So to see the follow-up, X-Men: Apocalypse just devolve into rehashing the same stories all over again was more than a little disappointing.
From retelling the exact same Professor X/Magneto conflict the franchise had been telling for decades, to a painfully grating attempt at making another memorable Quicksilver scene, to detouring the entire plot for a trip back to Alkali Lake for a piss-poor Wolverine cameo, Apocalypse was an absolute trainwreck that undid all of the good Days of Future Past had done just two years earlier.