20 Movie Franchises That Carried On For Way Too Long

17. Scary Movie

The Movies: Scary Movie (2000), Scary Movie 2 (2001), Scary Movie 3 (2003), Scary Movie 4 (2006), Scary Movie 5 (2013) Somehow, the Scary Movie franchise has lasted for over a decade and brought in $815m at the worldwide box-office. The first one wasn't very good, but it still remains the high point of the series. It says a lot for the quality of your franchise that it gets worse after the Wayans brothers abandon ship, and hopefully the overwhelmingly negative response to Scary Movie 5 puts the final nail in the coffin. The first Scary Movie parodied the slasher genre, particularly Scream, which was kind of strange seeing as Scream itself was a play on the conventions of the genre, but the movie grossed almost $300m worldwide and spawned a quick cash-in the following year. Scary Movie 2 lampoons the William Castle-esque haunted house movies of the 1950s and 60s. The series widened its gaze to poke fun at movies of every genre, but the schtick grew tired very fast. A definite improvement on the previous movie, Scary Movie 3 featured plenty of awful jokes and pointless celebrity cameos, but still topped the US box office for two weeks. Despite the title, 2006's Scary Movie 4 parodies very few actual horror movies and instead takes aim at everything from War of the Worlds to George W Bush, forgetting the important rule that spoofs need to be funny, not just an endless parade of cameos and pop culture references. After 7 years, Scary Movie 5 was released and featured none of the principal cast from the previous four movies, and was the worst one yet, as well as the least successful financially by far. Which was just what it deserved, as the reliance on low-brow humor and references to movies that had come out years before weren't funny in the least. Hopefully this has sounded the death-knell for a franchise that ironically carried on too long and gradually became worse, much like the horror movies the original was meant to be poking fun at.