10 Movies That Accidentally Set Up Sequels
5. First Blood
As brilliant a film as it is, production of First Blood was no picnic, with star Sylvester Stallone viewing the first cut of the movie and thinking it could kill his career.
As an adaptation of David Morrell's 1972 novel of the same name, First Blood was intended to be a standalone action drama which, like the novel, would end with Rambo's (Stallone) death.
The original ending shot during principal photography, where Rambo grabs Colonel Trautman's (Richard Crenna) gun and shoots himself dead, was received with great scorn by test audiences, who wanted Rambo to live.
And so, in the hope of salvaging his troubled film, director Ted Kotcheff deferred to a new ending in which Rambo survives and is taken into custody. This ended the movie on a more satisfying note for general audiences, and First Blood was a major commercial success.
The side effect of changing the ending, though, was that it made the film's rights-holders eager for more, and so despite Morrell's novel having no sequels to draw from, a modest action-thriller was transformed into a mega action-schlock franchise.
Author Morrell has had a mixed relationship with the sequels - he opted to write the novelisations of First Blood Part II and Rambo III because he felt the films weren't wholly consistent with Rambo's character, and later expressed embarrassment at being associated with the fifth film, Last Blood.
Ultimately First Blood's revised ending was an attempt to prevent a film that was testing poorly from bombing at the box office, but the secondary consequence was that it left Rambo alive for a glut of sequels of wildly varying quality.