10 Biggest Ever Movie Franchise Mistakes
2. Repeatedly Killing Off Cherished Characters - Alien
Much like Terminator, the first two Alien movies are bonafide masterpieces, after which mileage begins to massively vary.
Alien 3, though certainly not a terrible film, commits the original sin that would taint the rest of the franchise.
The opening moments of the film reveal that Aliens' beloved characters Hicks (Michael Biehn) and young Newt (Carrie Henn) both died brutal deaths during cryostasis, again leaving Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) the lone survivor.
Considering the bond Ripley shared with Hicks and Newt, and how hard she'd fought to save Newt in Aliens, it felt like a massive slap in the face to dispose of them in such perfunctory fashion.
The hits kept on coming, though, as Alien 3 also saw Ripley become impregnated with a Xenomorph embryo herself and, in the film's final moments, throw herself into a furnace to prevent its birth.
The audience's final tactile human connection to the franchise was dead, and if that had been the end of Alien perhaps it would've worked.
But Alien Resurrection arrived five years later and had to overcome the awkward issue of how to revive the series without its beloved heroine.
The answer? Bring Ripley back as a human-Xenomorph clone who is conveniently able to recall some of her original memories due to the Xenomorph's genetic memory.
It's glorified fan fiction, and underlined just how much of a mistake it was to kill Ripley if the series was going to continue.
Ironically Alien Resurrection's commercial underperformance caused it to end the original run of Alien movies, and it was another 15 years before Fox tried again with the prequel Prometheus.
Yet seemingly having learned nothing, Prometheus introduced audiences to the intriguing new heroine Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and also the mysterious alien race known as the Engineers, only for sequel Alien: Covenant to kill Shaw off-screen and swiftly nuke the Engineers out of existence.
Unsurprisingly Covenant also underperformed commercially, putting the big-screen series on ice in favour of an upcoming FX TV series.