10 Movie Franchises That Wasted Their Perfect Ending

We're currently six movies deep into the Alien franchise - or eight if you include the Alien vs. Predator films - and yet for many, the series essentially wrapped up after just two.

James Cameron did the near-impossible with his sequel Aliens, managing to deliver a more action-packed, character-driven follow-up to Ridley Scott's original that stood tall on its own merits.

Aliens ended with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) vanquishing the Xenomorph Queen before going into stasis alongside Newt (Carrie Henn), Hicks (Michael Biehn), and Bishop (Lance Henriksen) for the trip back to Earth.

It's a flawlessly straight-forward, tied-off ending in which the antagonistic force has been destroyed, the heroes get their deserved rest, and that's all she wrote.

But Fox finally released Alien 3 in 1992, which opened with an act which left many fans fuming - the deaths of Newt and Hicks.

To undo Aliens' happy ending and afford such a miserable off-screen fate to two beloved characters was seen as sacrilegious by many, who felt that the series was basically best left alone.

That Ripley ends up impregnated with a Xenomorph Queen and sacrifices herself to kill it at film's end didn't help matters, either.

Yet at least Alien 3's ending was itself quite definitive, only for Alien Resurrection to go full fanfic and improbably resurrect Ripley with the help of cloning and genetic memory.

In the years since we've had two hit-and-miss prequels and the nixed development of a planned Sigourney Weaver-starring Alien 5 which would've served as a direct sequel to Aliens.

But since 1986, there hasn't been much of a compelling argument to keep the series going once it arrived at its perfectly fitting ending.