10 All-Time Great Franchises That Still Had One Bad Movie
4. Rocky V
The Rocky franchise may have come perilously close to descending into self-parody on more than a few occasions, but cinema's most famous fictional boxer wasn't part of something genuinely terrible until the fifth installment decided that having a fighter at the peak of his career batter lumps out of a brain-damaged retiree in a dingy back alley was the direction they wanted to go.
It would be nearly two decades before Creed showed that it was possible to make a great Rocky movie without having the Italian Stallion step into the ring, but Rocky V's failed attempts at reinventing the narrative wheel only served to send the series into hibernation for sixteen years.
Rocky IV's desire to overdose on Americana and bring robots into the equation saw shark-jumping become a real possibility, but the movie ended up thriving based on the overwhelming cheese factor alone. The franchise lived and died by the in-ring action, and taking it to the back streets only ended up becoming a massive misstep for what had once been one of cinema's biggest brands.