10 Franchises That Peaked With The First Movie

10. The Mummy

Stephen Sommers' decision to reboot Universal's classic horror franchise as an Indiana Jones-inspired adventure serial was never designed to be viewed as high art, but in terms of pure pulpy entertainment it nonetheless provided one of the 90's greatest guilty pleasures.

It was big, dumb fun and incredibly proud of that fact, bolstered by some cutting-edge (for the time) CGI and Brendan Fraser's surprisingly strong performance as a quick-witted action hero. With $415.9m at the box office, a sequel was an inevitability.

The Mummy Returns was cut-and-paste sequel making at its finest, essentially following virtually the exact same narrative path as the first installment with some minor tweaks and much lesser results, including the feature film debut of Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, whose career somehow managed to recover from being rendered into one of the worst CGI creations in the history of cinema.

Seven years later the franchise itself was resurrected from a seemingly eternal slumber, with Tomb of the Dragon Emperor coming from Rob Cohen. The threequel was terrible and somehow managed to have the worst effects in the series to date and be boring as hell despite featuring Jet Li as a mummy that can turn into a dragon and angry abominable snowmen.

The Mummy was never the most critically-lauded blockbuster series out there, but at the turn of the 21st Century it was popular enough to spawn The Scorpion King spin-off (which itself got four straight-to-video sequels), an animated series that ran for two seasons, and rollercoasters at three Universal Studios theme parks, something not many modern franchises can lay claim to.