10 Things We Learned About Cinema In 2017

Ever since franchise filmmaking became Hollywood's go-to method of generating maximum revenue at the expense of original ideas and the mid-budget movie, doomsayers have been predicting the potentially-catastrophic effect it would have on the industry if the bubble were to burst, if audiences simply got sick and tired of formulaic $200m blockbusters and stopped paying to watch them.

While that didn't happen, and won't for a while yet, an alarming number of big-name franchises suffered from the law of diminishing returns last year.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Cars 3, Alien: Covenant, Transformers: The Last Knight and even the acclaimed War for the Planet of the Apes saw their box office totals drop by hundreds of millions of dollars when compared to the last installment in their respective series.

Even billion-dollar behemoths Star Wars: The Last Jedi and The Fate of the Furious were much less lucrative than their predecessors, showing that the trend starts at the very top. It isn't exactly time to sound the alarm bells just yet, but with the sheer number of sequels released every year (and most of them packed into the already-crowded summer months) the idea of franchise fatigue setting in across the entire industry is becoming a very real prospect.