10 Film Franchises You Really Should Stop Watching After The First Movie
8. The "Hannibal" Franchise
1991's Silence of the Lambs introduced the movie-going public to the delightfully insane Hannibal Lecter, a role that earned Anthony Hopkins an Oscar, and the #1 spot on AFI's Top 50 Movie Villains list. The film, based on a novel of the same name by Thomas Harris, was one of only three to ever win the 'big five' Academy Awards: Best Picture, Actor (Hopkins), Actress (Jodie Foster), Director (Jonathan Demme) and Adapted Screenplay (Ted Tally). It was a genre-bending crime thriller that is rightly considered one of the greatest films of all-time.
By 1999, Harris had penned a sequel, Hannibal, so it was only a matter of time before someone had the nerve to adapt the novel to the big screen. David Mamet and Steven Zaillan were up to the task, while Ridley Scott directed the 2001 film and, most importantly, Hopkins was back to play the titular character.
Unfortunately, the movie was a campy bore, filled with over-the-top gratuitous violence, such as one character eating his own brain, and none of the intellect and cerebral insights of the predecessor.
A year later, Brett Ratner directed, and Tally was back to adapt Red Dragon, a prequel to Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. There's nothing abjectly bad about the film, despite the protestations that it was a glorified remake of Michael Mann's 1986 film, Manhunter.
As a result, Red Dragon came across as completely superfluous. Sure, it was fun watching Hopkins play Lecter again, but nobody was going to be able to top the all-time greatness of the original, so why bother?
Quid pro quo, I guess.