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

4. Batman

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Warner Bros.

In just eight years, the Batman franchise had devolved from Michael Keaton's unhinged Bruce Wayne patrolling a noir-influenced and Gothic-inspired landscape to a neon-and-nipples extravaganza that gave the Caped Crusader a credit card and saw Arnold Schwarzenegger earn nearly a million dollars for every horrible ice-related pun that he made on an all-too-regular basis.

It seems impossible to think that Batman Forever and Batman & Robin take place in the same reality as Tim Burton's two stabs at the Dark Knight, such were the wholesale changes Joel Schumacher made to almost everything including the cast, crew, production design and general overall quality.

The first two were the works of a filmmaker with a unique and singular vision who just happened to be playing in the sandbox of one of the world's most popular and recongizable character, while the third and fourth were cynical exercises designed to sell toys by a studio that found Burton's aesthetic to be a little too limiting to the franchise's earning potential.

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