8 Film Franchises That Became Victims Of Their Own Popularity

2. Saw Got Trapped In Twist Expectation (And Escalating Gore)

It's a tale as old as time - audiences love something the first time, so film-makers make it again. And again. And again...

In the case of the Saw franchise, the film-makers made it seven times in total. Which sucks, because the films actually started out as pretty good (at the very least they were interesting). The first entry was fairly low budget, so it had to work hard to be unsettling. Though the vast majority of people associate the franchise with extreme gore, Saw doesn't actually have a whole lot of gruesomeness in it. Much of the torture is implied, or we merely witness the aftermath of it through flashback. What this meant was that the writers could focus on constructing interesting mysteries, characters, and a fairly compelling hostage narrative. In the end, though, there were two incredibly popular elements that damned the franchise. The first was the traps, which gradually became so elaborate that they crossed from horrifying into hilarious, and took up so much of the writers' time that the story suffered. The second was the twist ending, which shifted the course of all subsequent sequel narratives entirely. Every sequel had to finish with a convoluted "surprise", which shaped the overall plot of subsequent films rather than the plot leading to a natural conclusion. After the Saw and Saw II, the franchise was lost forever.