10 Movie Franchises That Wasted Their Perfect Ending

Bringing a movie franchise to a satisfying conclusion is incredibly difficult, so it's little surprise that so many get it wrong, or at least leave fans massively divided by the end result.

But sometimes filmmakers actually find the perfect finale, only for the franchise to ill-advisedly continue on afterwards, in turn undoing and even outright ruining that wonderful ending.

Unsurprisingly, studios are incredibly reluctant for movies to deliver concrete franchise-stopping endings, because there's nothing they love more than the warm commercial reliability of a successful cinematic IP.

And even when films have carved out the most dramatically fitting, gratifying conclusion, when there's money to be made, they've never been above unpicking that ending and starting things up all over again.

Some viewers simply decide to commit that original ending to their "head-canon" and pretend that the subsequent movies don't exist - especially if they're all terrible - while others are at least willing to embrace that the unnecessary follow-ups hold some entertainment value.

Each of these franchises nevertheless came up with a deeply compelling end-point, but ultimately opted to keep going in the industrious pursuit of more money...

It'd be a massive understatement to simply say that the Halloween series has had its ups and downs, yet while many might argue that the franchise has offered few worthwhile entries beyond John Carpenter's 1978 original and David Gordon Green's 2018 sequel, Halloween did navigate a fitting end-point almost 25 years ago.

After years of bewilderingly awful sequels, the seventh movie, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, finally pulled the trigger on what appeared to be the unambiguous demise of Michael Myers (Chris Durand) at the hands of franchise heroine Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis).

The movie ends in spectacular, fist-pumping fashion when, following a prolonged fight, Laurie swiftly decapitates Michael with an axe. His head rolls to the floor, Laurie takes some breaths of relief, and we abruptly cut to the credits. The End.

This felt like such a perfect, no-bulls**t ending for the series, but horror being horror, Michael Myers was never going to stay dead forever.

And this being before the concept of a reboot was popularised, the producers instead opted to retcon Michael's death for the sequel, Halloween: Resurrection, revealing that Myers had switched places with a poor paramedic at the last minute, meaning Laurie had killed an innocent man.

To make matters worse, Michael then killed Laurie off, in turn ruining the franchise for a solid 15 years until David Gordon Green finally brought it back to decency.

At least when Halloween Ends soon releases, there's a good chance it actually gives the Laurie/Michael saga a definitive ending, before Universal reboots it sometime in the future of course.