10 Movie Franchises That Started Great And Then Fell Off A Cliff

7. Robocop

Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Men Tell no Tales
Orion Pictures

You can't imagine that Paul Verhoeven had designed Robocop with franchise potential in mind, given that the movie was full of thinly-veiled digs at corporate America and consumerism at large, but after it turned out to be a huge success and gain a reputation as one of the best action movies of the decade, a multimedia empire was soon built without the slightest hint of irony.

Robocop 2 was a workmanlike follow-up that hit the mandated story and character beats without bringing anything new or original to the table, but as the sequel to a movie that had so much to say about society and plenty of jet-black subversive humor, that simply wasn't good enough.

The second instalment may not have been abjectly terrible, but the third one definitely was. Robocop 3 remains one of the worst sequels ever made, one that replaced Peter Weller in the title role and hoped nobody noticed... which they almost got away with based on how distractingly bad everything else that happened in the movie was.

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