10 Great Movie Franchises That Lost It By The End

Modern Hollywood was built on the back of huge movie franchises - massive blockbusters starring huge stars and filled with special effect orgies. They're the kind of films that make Martin Scorsese wake up in a cold sweat and call Francis Ford Coppola for comfort, but they also make fans queue up for tickets weeks in advance.

These movies smell like summer.

And as long as we keep coming out for them, studios will continue to look for opportunities to extend them. Sometimes beyond the point where they're even any good.

While some franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe or The Fast and the Furious keep cranking out solid, bankable box office hits, others start falling apart the longer they go on. They begin to rot from the inside and some often lose sight of what made them great in the first place.

Though some of these franchises are still putting new movies out, their best days are long behind them and it might just be time to stop.

Die Hard is arguably the best action movie ever made, and to some the greatest Christmas movie ever made. It's strange to think it now, but it was a transgressive, transformative genre addition that flipped the idea of traditional heroism on its head, starring a comedy actor as a loveable, inventive rogue rather than a muscle-bound superman.

We loved it - and continue to - for its rough edges.

The sequels, on the other hand, are something of a different story. The first two are pretty solid and actually extend John McClane's story, but you can start to see the problems in With A Vengeance, because it was never actually intended to be a Die Hard movie in the first place. The studio saw an opportunity though and the franchise moved on.

From there, the fourth and fifth chapters go from bad to worse and ended up completely losing what made the first movie great. McClane is almost unrecognisable and it's just not pleasant to watch.