10 Movie Franchises With No Bad Sequels

The John Wick series is perfect start to end.

Movie Franchises With No Bad Sequels
Lionsgate

Perfect movie franchises are a hard thing to come by. Making a killer debut is hard enough, but to then stick that landing, two, three, or even four times after that is a daunting prospect.

Star Wars has a flawed prequel and sequel series, and The Lord of the Rings has those unfortunate Hobbit follow-ups which reduced poor Ian McKellen to tears during their production. This doesn't take the shine off the legitimately good entries, but it does highlight that, the longer a franchise goes on, the chances of crafting repeat bangers diminish greatly.

However, not every franchise has encountered this problem, with some having managed to maintain a consistent level of quality or just merely avoid the pitfall of a bad release in however many years they've been going for. Critical consensus may disagree in certain cases, and while there's no denying that some of these franchises failed to maintain the same level of quality as their original films, it's up for debate as to whether or not they entered truly "bad" territory.

For this list, there does need to be a slight delineation between "franchise" and "trilogy", as while there have been plenty of stellar movie trilogies, it's unlikely for an iconic movie franchise with four or more entries to have avoided a flawed release. Spinoffs and prequels are also counted here, which, unfortunately for Alien, means it doesn't make the cut.

In any case, the following film series all managed to defy the odds, and deliver the goods over an impressive amount of time.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.