10 Franchises That Peaked With The First Movie

Richard Donner's Superman remains one of the most beloved superhero flicks ever made 40 years later, whereas 1987's Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is regarded as one of the worst movies ever made, regardless of genre.

You may believe a man can fly, but you definitely won't believe that an industrial park in Milton Keynes passes for New York City.

Somehow managing to overcome its torturous production that saw it go wildly over-budget and over-schedule, Superman was a massive hit that balanced groundbreaking special effects with an unbridled sense of optimism, delivering pure blockbuster escapism the likes of which audiences had never seen before.

Even with the departure of Richard Donner that saw Richard Lester step in to finish the production, Superman II was a worthy if slightly inferior follow-up that preserved the matinee spirit of the original and introduced Terrence Stamp's iconic General Zod to the masses. From here, the franchise would go into an irreversible tailspin from which it would never recover.

Quite why anybody involved thought that turning a Superman movie into a camp slapstick comedy where the title character takes a backseat to Richard Pryor was a good idea is anybody's guess, and the disappointing critical and commercial reaction to Superman III only reinforced the notion that the Big Blue Boy Scout was on shaky ground.

By the time audiences bore witness to the atrocity of the fourth installment, the Man of Steel was well and truly buried six feet under in a spectacularly cheap and sh*tty movie that essentially consigned Superman to the cinematic scrapheap for almost 20 years.