Pitch Black, the first film in the Riddick franchise, was created on a much smaller budget than the sequels that followed, and it benefited greatly from it. The small-scale attitude enforced on the project meant that actual effort had to be put into the characters and premise, and the result was a smart and suspense filled science fiction that your imagination was more than willing to meet halfway. The torrent of big-budget effects that was missing from the first film was unleashed in the second, however. Chronicles of Riddick was always going to struggle to appease the growing cult fan-base of the original movie, and while it ticked all the relevant boxes in terms of being a bog-standard action movie, it failed as a sequel to Pitch Black. With more plot holes than black holes, The Chronicles Of Riddick made little sense in the cinematic cut and somehow even less sense in David Twohys directors cut. Instead of having Riddick come out of hiding after five years to avenge a conveniently murdered friend in painfully formulaic fashion, Twohy and Vin Diesel ought to have delved deeper into the characters fascinating back story and avoided the blockbuster route. Twohy did say that he saw Pitch Black as a prequel to the larger Riddick trilogy, though he may have missed a trick by not going back further and exploring the anti-heros dark past. Pivotal canonical events that were only alluded to should have been fully played out on-screen - the prophecy of the Furyan male (Riddick, of course) who would defeat the Necromonger Zhylaw, and that same Necromonger subsequently strangling most of Furya's newborns with their own umbilical chords. Not exactly blockbuster material, but definitely the direction in which this franchise needed to go in order to stand out from the crowd.
