10 Movie Franchises Saved From Extinction By Sequels

Is there anything more satisfying for film fans than seeing a series which seemed to be up against the ropes spring back into life? Well yes, there’s the spectacle of a much-maligned director regaining their magic touch—shout out to Guy Ritchie’s 2008 RocknRolla and, er, this year’s effort The Gentlemen. We’re not sure how many times the British crime helmer is allowed lose his touch before it’s gone for good, but we love to see him grab it back nonetheless.

Everyone loves when their favourite franchise manages to bring things back on track after a disastrous instalment derails the affair for a film or two. A lot of these examples came late in long franchises, injecting a bit of adrenaline and heart into a series which had become infamous for merely recycling plots and producing a stream of so-so cash-ins.

However, some of these sequels were early enough to fix franchises before they had even gone fully off the rails, and some came so long after their initial inspirations that they effectively reinvented a franchise for another generation—props to Jurassic World and Fury Road for showing younger viewers what all the fuss was about decades earlier.

In any case, here are a few case studies which prove beyond a doubt that no franchise is beyond salvation (well, maybe the Leprechaun movies).

The late great Scream helmer Wes Craven made a habit of reinventing the horror genre once a decade during his prime. First he set the scene for the gritty, hyper-realistic social commentary horror of the post-Vietnam seventies with the unsparing The Last House on the Left, then by the nineties he was ready to reignite the then-ailing slasher craze via the hugely successful meta-horror Scream and its subsequent sequels.

But his most well-remembered contribution to the genre has to be 1984’s fusion of fantasy and the slasher subgenre, A Nightmare on Elm Street. The film melded inventive, trippy dream sequences which took advantage of its villain’s reality-bending abilities with gruesome scares, and won over both audiences and critics as a result.

However, Craven declined the opportunity to shoot a hastily thrown-together sequel, and 1985’s A Nightmare on Elm Street Part II: Freddy’s Revenge was a laughable disaster, reviled for abandoning the unique “dream killer” premise and losing any effective scares in the process. Fortunately, future The Blob and The Mask helmer Chuck Russell was on hand to save the day with the third instalment, Dream Warriors.

Cartoon-ier, gorier, and more creative than its predecessor, the flick brought the series back to the heights of the first film and reignited the franchise’s fire.