9 Movie Franchises That Completely Spiraled Out Of Control
7. Saw
Saw was a pretty simple horror/thriller about two guys who wake up in a room and have to figure out how they got there. Saw IIwas a good sequel, but Saw III really messed everything up. In a shocking twist, Jigsaw dies at the end of Saw III, leaving the writers of Saw IVtrying to figure out how the hell to continue the series after the main villain is dead. The answer? Devolve into a crazy series of flashbacks, flashforwards and parallel storylines as an excuse to keep Jigsaw around. For instance, theres the reveal that the whole plot of Saw IV actually took place during the events of Saw III. It became a tradition to end each movie with a twist, which the next film then had to pick up the pieces from, and that led to some pretty dumb stuff. At one point we reveal that Hoffman, one of the victims, was actually in on it the whole time and he becomes Jigsaws new apprentice. By the end of Saw 3D: The Final Chapter, its revealed that Gordon, the original victim from the first movie who cut off his foot, was actually working for Jigsaw too. What? This decision retroactively took away so much from the first movie, one of the worst things a sequel can do. How many times can the franchise jump through time or reveal that someone was really working for Jigsaw all along? The first two movies worked because they were simple, but as the series progresses and we get all these crazy plot twists and conspiracies, the whole thing quickly becomes impossible to follow without taking notes. In fact, there are tons of infographics online trying to make any sort of sense of the timeline. The writers probably couldn't have kept something as simple as the first Saw going for long, but then maybe that's a reason why Saw didn't need so many sequels.
