5 Directors Who Should Never Have Returned To The Franchises They Created

4. Steven Spielberg - The Lost World & Indiana Jones: The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

spielberg indy

Steven Spielberg is an American treasure, he seemingly can do no wrong. Until The Lost World, that is. Now, it's nowhere near as bad as Rocky V was, but I'm a firm believer in the idea that if you hit perfection, as he did with the original Jurassic Park in 1993, then you shouldn't attempt to follow it up unless you're absolutely sure that you can hit another home run. Spielberg didn't drop the ball, rather he smashed someone's face in with the bat. All the things that should have been cool about the second Jurassic Park, namely Jeff Goldblum and the T Rex rampaging around San Diego, just weren't. Later, in 2008, he tried returning to another great franchise, Indiana Jones. That didn't work out well, either. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull played out like a parody of the films that went before it, with further insult added by putting Shia Labeouf in as Indy's apprentice, and Cate Blanchett doing what I think is supposed to be a Russian accent. It's a mess. A bigger mess than The Lost World, in retrospect. I see what you did there, Spielberg, covering your tracks, made an even worse sequel to distract us from the already pretty bad sequel...I can't wait to see how his sequels to War Horse and Lincoln turn out.
 
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Contributor

Freelance writer, specialising in film and television, sometimes dabbling into video games and comic writing, though not as often as he should. Outside of this, he enjoys waiting for an entire season of a show to finish so he can blitz them in a weekend, buying loads of films and video games and never getting around to even opening them, or acquiring entire back catalogues of authors and never finding time to read them.