10 All-Time Great Franchises That Still Had One Bad Movie

Despite arriving just six months after Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions would earn over $300m less at the box office than its immediate predecessor, with the reviews also being much more negative. In just half a year, the back-to-back sequels had gone from being two of the most highly-anticipated movies in history to a major disappointment that took the wind right out of the sails of what had the potential to be a game-changing trilogy.

The second installment at least had some decent action scenes to keep audiences occupied, but Revolutions ended up undoing a lot of the narrative heavy lifting that was required of Reloaded by doubling down on the pseudo-psychological nonsense and crafting a climax that aimed for epic, but instead came off like a glorified live-action episode of Dragonball Z.

The Wachowskis have always been great at world-building, but it would be an understatement to say that their writing often lets them down, and in the space of just four years the groundbreaking original had descended into an almost-unrecognizable blend of pixels, misplaced profundity and an inflated sense of self-importance that bordered dangerously close to outright pretension.