10 Movie Endings That KILLED Franchises For Good

Franchises are the lifeblood that keeps the lights on in Hollywood, and so what do studios hate more than anything? Endings - especially endings which, for one reason or another, close the door on a movie series.

Sometimes the creators decide they want to wrap things up, perhaps ailing box office grosses force producers to begrudgingly accept their franchise's inevitable demise, or the filmmakers simply do something so misguided that it derails the IP overnight.

To be clear, a franchise-killing ending isn't always a bad thing - sometimes they're simply indicative of the fact that a series has run its course and has nowhere else to go after reaching a natural conclusion.

Granted, few name IP will ever remain dead "for good," but in the very least it's going to be a long, long time before a studio dusts these decisively dead franchises off for another go-around.

In every way that it matters, these franchises were wiped out by endings that either killed off the main cast members, brought the story to an organic close, or simply pissed fans off so much the series got cancelled...

There were many who hoped - or at least assumed - that The Matrix Resurrections was intended to kickstart a new trilogy of Matrix movies led by a younger cast of characters, not unlike Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

But director Lana Wachowski couldn't have made her disinterest in The Matrix as an ongoing franchise any clearer.

Throughout Resurrections, Wachowski took a number of meta jabs at Warner Bros. and the soullessness of modern blockbuster IP in general, basically confessing in the middle of the movie that she only came back for a fourth film because the studio was going to make it without her regardless.

And so, Resurrections ends with antagonist The Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) being summarily defeated, and Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) rebuilding the Matrix in their own image, both of them now apparently being versions of The One (The Two?).

Given that Wachowski has further stated that she has no interest in sequels, and Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss have both said they wouldn't return without her involvement, there's really no place for the series to go after this.

With all major conflicts resolved while Neo and Trinity are positioned as a basically unstoppable superhero pairing, the four-film arc feels neatly tied off. It's just as well, given that Resurrections was also a colossal box office bomb.

While it's inevitable that Warner Bros. will reboot The Matrix with an entirely new cast and crew years from now, the franchise as we know it was basically capped in the head by Resurrections' ending, and Wachowski evidently wouldn't have had it any other way.