10 Film Franchises That Successfully Recovered From Awful Entries

The Awful Entry – Rocky V (1990)

The first four Rocky movies are almost universally liked, despite the fact that they devolve from the highly emotional, down-to-earth and Academy Award For Best Picture winning original to the ludicrous ‘Rocky defeats a Soviet superman and essentially ends the Cold War’ premise of the fourth. Nevertheless, they each had their individual merits and are fondly rewatched time after time by film aficionados across the world.

Almost completely meritless is Rocky V, which seemingly killed the series. Riddled with lazy clichés, it attempts to recapture the spirit of the original by taking fame and fortune away from Rocky and building him back up from nothing, with disastrous results.

Making just $120 million (a steep fall from IV’s $300 million), it seemed a turgid end for one of modern cinema’s most beloved characters. Few expected Rocky to ever make a comeback and it was therefore surprising when Rocky Balboa was released in 2006. Massively scaling back the budget and the outlandish plots of its predecessors, it took the bold step of focusing on the tragedy of Rocky as a character in a nuanced fashion.

It seemed like a one and done deal to give fans (and Sylvester Stallone, who has publicly apologised for the quality of V on several occasions) closure, but Rocky has now returned to form in the two recent Creed movies, giving them a platform to now strike out on their own now that his arc is well and truly complete.