10 Massive Movie Franchises With No Interesting Characters
Countless billions at the box office, but not a single three-dimensional personality to be found.
Long gone are the days when it was the plot of a movie that would draw audiences towards cinemas in their numbers, with the quality of Hollywood's output now largely sold and marketed on the back of pre-existing properties and the endless parade of sequels, reboots, remakes and re-imaginings that flood theaters on an annual basis.
Admittedly, some of the industry's premiere franchises are very, very good, but many of them are more than lacking in the character department. These are often people that we spend multiple movies with, and yet they never elevate themselves beyond the standard tropes of the blockbuster genre, instead relying on high stakes and action sequences as a substitute for any sort of human connection at all.
Not all of them are terrible by any means, but there are still plenty of big-name brands that run for years and sometimes even decades, but still provide audiences with precisely zero interesting characters at the end of it.
That being said, people still love these franchises even in spite of such a notable flaw, and they already proved countless times over that they'd happily keep coming back for more for as long as the studio keeps making them.
10. Fifty Shades
This shouldn't really come as a surprise given that the entire point of these film adaptations was to mass-market some big screen titillation to the cabal of Karens around the world who had devoured every page of the source material that was completely laughable to begin with.
Nobody was expecting fully-realized and three-dimensional characters from three movies that originally spawned from the loins of Twilight fan fiction, but as well as leads Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson generating so little chemistry that it almost becomes impressive, not a single person that appeared in Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker or Fifty Shades Free acts or sounds like a human being would in real life.
Just a trilogy of pretty people doing tedious things, the franchise still managed to gobble over $1.3bn as the studio indulged in some pitch-perfect marketing to their target audience. That being said, nobody came for the characters... in fact, that's probably a very poor choice of words.