10 Movies Everyone Skips In A Franchise

Hollywood naturally wants to turn every successful movie into a franchise, and while giving audiences more of what they love isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's tough for filmmakers to maintain a level of consistency across many entries.

Familiarity breeds contempt, after all, and once audiences have seen a similar setup play out four or five times, it's tough to avoid the law of diminishing returns kicking in. All the same, there are plenty of successful franchises that have iterated just enough with each new movie to keep fans coming back, and then there are those series that have just one rough outing nobody really likes.

That's certainly true of the following movie franchises, each of which has a single film you'll likely just avoid outright on a revisit, because your time is actually worth something.

While none of these franchises are perfect, outside of these movies they're mostly pretty damn good, and in the least, these are the only films in each series that truly feel creatively bankrupt from start to finish, to the extent that many wouldn't care if they didn't exist at all.

Rocky V is basically that One Miserable Entry most fans would prefer to forget ever happened.

Originally envisioned as a finale to the beloved boxing franchise, Rocky V brought Rocky Balboa's (Sylvester Stallone) story to a depressing crescendo by making him broke and brain-damaged, before having him battle his former protege in a street fight.

It's a bleak coda to Rocky's journey, and one which was critically panned and commercially disappointing. 

In fact, it was loathed enough that Stallone decided to return for a sixth film 16 years later, Rocky Balboa, which gave Rocky a far more fitting final bout in the ring. And with the Rocky franchise now totalling a whopping nine movies, including the Creed trilogy, Rocky V remains the single bummer, dud entry - a catastrophic creative miscalculation on Stallone's part, albeit one which he eventually remedied.

If you skip straight from Rocky IV to Rocky Balboa on a watch-through, you've missed basically nothing worthwhile.