10 Biggest Ever Movie Franchise Mistakes

Making one great or even basically good movie sure isn't easy, but a whole franchise?

When you factor in that most movie series are collaborated upon by dozens of actors, screenwriters, directors, producers, and other creative personnel, it's little surprise that there are often just too many cooks in the kitchen.

Though the Marvel Cinematic Universe makes maintaining an ongoing movie world seem basically effortless, it requires a massive amount of work to maintain such a consistent level of quality, as these 10 franchises all thoroughly prove.

These series, from massively successful blockbuster IP to more modest horror franchises, have all made colossal mistakes which ended up hurting them either critically, commercially, or both.

From overzealously chasing trends to killing off beloved characters too soon, or maybe just not planning things out in advance, these series all stumbled massively because nobody in a position of creative authority was truly thinking things through.

Perhaps greed got in the way or there were other business-related concerns, but whatever the reason, audiences were left massively disappointed, even infuriated, by these catastrophic, franchise-derailing mistakes...

The success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe popularised interconnected, ongoing blockbuster movie series, and before long Warner Bros. set plans in motion to create DC's own answer to the MCU.

The studio launched what would become the DC Extended Universe with 2013's divisive Man of Steel, yet rather than follow it up with solo movies for each core member of the Justice League, Warner Bros. basically tried to take a shortcut.

And so, 2016's Batman v Superman introduced not only Batman (Ben Affleck) but also Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), The Flash (Ezra Miller), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), and Cyborg (Ray Fisher), the latter three appearing in piecemeal, stapled-on cameos.

It was painfully clear that Warner Bros. was desperately trying to speed-run the world-building aspect of their franchise in order to get a Justice League movie going as fast as possible.

Except Batman v Superman's polarising response and commercial underperformance ultimately forced the studio to suddenly change tack and revise the already-shooting Justice League into a more light-hearted affair.

This did nothing to address the fact that audiences hadn't yet been invited to care much for The Flash, Aquaman, or Cyborg.

And so, with only Superman and Wonder Woman having their own proper solo movies before Justice League was released in 2017, it wasn't terribly surprising that the superhero epic failed to strike a chord with audiences.

A hellish post-production didn't help, but the salient point is that while Marvel Studios took their time to develop well-received vehicles for most of their focal superheroes, Warner Bros. couldn't see past the dollar signs of a Justice League film.

While you can't really blame the studio for wanting to give a Cyborg solo movie a wide berth, had Aquaman and The Flash been given their own movies upfront, audiences might've been a little more interested in a team-up.

Plus, Warner Bros. could've observed the reaction to these films and then calibrated the Justice League script accordingly, rather than short-sightedly shoving it out the front door.