10 Terrible Threequels That Ruined A GREAT Trilogy

Making one great movie is hard enough, but turning in an entire trilogy of them? It's nothing short of a Herculean feat - a major miracle, even.

And so, there's good reason that so few consistently terrific movie trilogies actually exist. 

After making one great film and getting more resources to produce a bigger, better sequel, delivering a fitting trilogy-capper that ties it all together is one hell of a steep mountain to climb.

There are many disappointing threequels, then, but what about those that whiffed so aggressively that they basically left you rethinking the entire trilogy project as a whole?

That's unfortunately the case with these franchises, each of which delivered great films, only to fall short on the third and final hurdle. 

From long-awaited superhero threequels to belated comedy follow-ups that simply lost all the magic, these movies all brought their respective series to a deeply unsatisfying, even forgettable conclusion.

In some cases, in fact, these movies were catastrophic enough failures that another sequel was produced years or even decades later, if only to end the franchise the right way and leave fans feeling good about the whole thing...

Sam Raimi's original Spider-Man was at the forefront of Hollywood's superhero boom in the early 2000s, but Spider-Man 2 was basically an improvement in every single way.

The sequel elevated the stakes, brought greater emotional dimension to the central characters, and delivered an all-timer villain for comic book cinema in Alfred Molina's Doc Ock.

But as is so often the problem with a legendary second movie, it becomes so damn difficult to top or even match it the next time. And so, like so many horrid threequels, Spider-Man 3 ended up grossly overegging the pudding.

The film's most-cited issue is its excess of villains, hurling Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church), Venom (Topher Grace), and New Goblin (James Franco) into the mix and ultimately struggling to pay off any of them satisfactorily.

It's no secret that Raimi was basically strong-armed into including Venom in the film against his will, and boy it shows.

Elsewhere there are atrocious retcons like making Sandman the killer of Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson), and awkward tonal shifts which, while clearly intentional, rubbed a lot of fans the wrong way.

A concluding Spider-Man movie in which the web-slinger battled Venom or Sandman sounded great on paper, but we ended up with a chaotic melange of ideas, characters, and tones that felt frankensteined together in post-production.