10 Movie Franchises That Screwed Up Their Final Part

3. X-Men: The Last Stand

The first X-Men films still hold up pretty well today. The first is brilliant, introducing Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and Sir Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier with the second then doing a respectable job at further expanding the universe and making you, sitting in your seat spilling popcorn down you, feel like you’re part of a universe brimming with magic and mystery.

And then comes the third, a half-baked, half-finished movie full of the ridiculous and the wrong in equal measure. Instead of focusing on the heroes, The Last Stand ends up boiling down to nothing more than a story about how Wolverine loves Jean Grey who miraculously comes back from the dead despite nobody actually really mourning her loss.

Of course, the film was rather doomed to begin with. Two excellent movies before this one meant this instalment was always going to struggle to meet expectations with problems in pre-production also contributing to its problems, costing it the chance to bow out on a high.

Director Bryan Singer quit early on and, if that wasn’t bad enough, took James Marsden’s Cyclops with him. Both men thought the grass was greener on the other side by working on Superman Returns but that film was so bad it never even got a sequel.