10 Awful Franchises That Proved Bad Movies Can Still Make Big Money
7. Underworld
Underworld was like Resident Evil, but somehow even worse, which goes some way to explaining both the consistently low quality and inexplicable popularity of the leather-clad fantasy franchise that somehow managed to spawn five movies in the space of thirteen years.
There wasn't a single remarkable, notable or even memorable thing about the franchise from the very beginning, it was just kind of... there. The average budget was around $40m and the average box office return was $107.9m, which made them all relatively profitable enterprises.
On the other side of the coin, the average Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores for the entire franchise were 25% and 36 respectively, and with such a low bar being set the fact that the series earned almost $540m worldwide isn't without merit, given how each new entry was greeted with little more than an apathetic shrug.