3. The Empire Strikes Back
LucasfilmSequels have been around Hollywood for a long time. Charlie Chaplin's incarnations of his The Tramp character could be thought of as sequels, or for a more direct example, the wonderful pairing of William Powell and Myrna Loy as the delightful crime-solving couple of Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man series during the 1930's certainly proved sequels had their place in Hollywood. However, the film "franchise" really started with George Lucas and The Empire Strikes Back. The enormous success of Star Wars in 1977 made the making of a sequel a mere formality, but had The Empire Strikes Back been a film of substandard quality, Star Wars as a franchise could have been DOA. However, The Empire Strikes Back is The Empire Strikes Back, and the rest, as they say, is history. The legacy of The Empire Strikes Back as a market force however is one where any film with the slightest passionate fanbase is obligated to turn itself into a film franchise. From The Empire Strikes Back forward, if the studios and the corporations that owned them had any doubts before, they now knew the name of the game was film franchising. With the evolution of pop culture, you could make the argument that the film "franchise" was simply a matter of time and that The Empire Strikes Back just happened to fill this role nicely. There is definitely some validity to this argument, but someone actually had to get the job done, and that film was The Empire Strikes Back. For that, there are surely many studio execs who say a daily thanks to George Lucas and his empire.