10 Movie Franchises That Wasted Their Perfect Ending

Any horror movie that gives itself the subtitle "The Final Chapter" should always be eyed with a high degree of skepticism, yet for a hot minute it actually seemed like Friday the 13th's fourth movie, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, would genuinely close up shop for the series.

After all, the film ends with the pretty damn definitive demise of Jason Voorhees (Ted White), who has his head grotesquely split in two by a machete-wielding Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman).

To hammer the point home, when Jason still shows signs of life, Tommy continues to hack away at him with the machete. The End.

And indeed, during production The Final Chapter was legitimately supposed to be the last Friday the 13th film, largely due to producer Frank Mancuso Jr. wishing to work on other projects.

But ultimately the decision was made to press on with a fifth film, which released less than a year later and revolved around a Jason copycat.

The negative reception to this prompted the filmmakers to revert back to actual Jason, whose corpse was dug up and reanimated courtesy of a lightning bolt in the sixth film. Yup.

The series limped on for ten lineal entries before the Freddy vs. Jason spin-off and 2009's remake, yet if the franchise wanted to retain any scrap of internal storytelling integrity, it should've stayed dead with Jason back in 1984.