10 Franchises That Peaked With The First Movie

Franchises have been Hollywood's bread and butter for decades now, and essentially a license to print money; if people vote with their wallets and make a movie a box office hit, then it stands to reason that they'll come back for more of the same.

The studios find it easy to churn out follow-ups every couple of years, confident and safe in the knowledge that their target audience want to see their favorite characters again and again. This may be stating the obvious, but the real challenge is making them good on a consistent basis.

Star Wars, Terminator, Alien, James Bond, Batman, Fast and Furious, Planet of the Apes, X-Men, you name it; even the biggest and most popular brands in the business have struggled to maintain a high level of consistency throughout their existence. They all boast some fantastic movies, but there's also a couple of duds thrown in for good measure.

On the other side of the coin, plenty of franchises begin with a bang and start off with a great movie, only for the law of diminishing returns to set in. Sequel after sequel arrives, and yet none of them ever manage to recapture the essence of what made the first installment so enjoyable in the first place, until they end up as nothing more than a cynical cash-grab and a shell of their former selves.

Stephen Sommers' decision to reboot Universal's classic horror franchise as an Indiana Jones-inspired adventure serial was never designed to be viewed as high art, but in terms of pure pulpy entertainment it nonetheless provided one of the 90's greatest guilty pleasures.

It was big, dumb fun and incredibly proud of that fact, bolstered by some cutting-edge (for the time) CGI and Brendan Fraser's surprisingly strong performance as a quick-witted action hero. With $415.9m at the box office, a sequel was an inevitability.

The Mummy Returns was cut-and-paste sequel making at its finest, essentially following virtually the exact same narrative path as the first installment with some minor tweaks and much lesser results, including the feature film debut of Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, whose career somehow managed to recover from being rendered into one of the worst CGI creations in the history of cinema.

Seven years later the franchise itself was resurrected from a seemingly eternal slumber, with Tomb of the Dragon Emperor coming from Rob Cohen. The threequel was terrible and somehow managed to have the worst effects in the series to date and be boring as hell despite featuring Jet Li as a mummy that can turn into a dragon and angry abominable snowmen.

The Mummy was never the most critically-lauded blockbuster series out there, but at the turn of the 21st Century it was popular enough to spawn The Scorpion King spin-off (which itself got four straight-to-video sequels), an animated series that ran for two seasons, and rollercoasters at three Universal Studios theme parks, something not many modern franchises can lay claim to.