10 Movie Franchises That Surprisingly Got Better

6. The Dollars Trilogy

There's no denying the brilliance of Sergio Leone's epic, Clint Eastwood-starring western trilogy, though it's undeniable that the series also had a slightly tainted beginning.

1964's A Fistful of Dollars, ludicrously entertaining though it is, cribbed shamelessly from Akira Kurosawa's 1961 classic Yojimbo, resulting in a lawsuit which allegedly caused 15% of the film's profit over $100,000 to go to Toho, the studio who financed Yojimbo.

Leone thankfully avoided any such controversy with his sequel, For a Few Dollars More, which upped the scale and found in El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) one of cinema's all-time most savage (and savagely entertaining) villains.

But the franchise's pièce de résistance was yet to come, with the trilogy-capping, three-hour The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Reuniting Eastwood with Lee Van Cleef and throwing Eli Wallach in the mix for good measure, the result is a virtually faultless embodiment of the spaghetti western, and one of the most purely entertaining films ever made.

All the movies are good-to-great, of course, but after the roughness of Leone lifting from a fellow master filmmaker - and initially refusing to own up to the fact - he delivered two increasingly thrilling movies that elevated the genre beyond what anyone could've reasonably expected.