10 Biggest Ever Movie Franchise Mistakes

so making one great or even basically good movie sure isn't easy but a whole franchise well that is something else altogether when you factor in that most movie series are collaborated on by dozens of actors screenwriters directors producers and other creative personnel it's little surprised there are often just too many cooks in the kitchen from overzealously chasing trends to killing off beloved characters too soon or maybe just not planning things out in advance all of these series that we're gonna cover today all stumbled massively because nobody in a position of creative authority was truly thinking things through so let's take a look at them as i'm jewels this is what culture.com and these are the 10 biggest ever movie franchise mistakes number 10 rushing to get a team-up movie out the dc extended universe the success of the marvel cinematic universe popularized interconnected ongoing blockbuster movie series and before long warner brothers set plans in motion to create dc's own answer to the mcu the studio launched what would become known as the dc extended universe with 2013's divisive man of steel yet rather than follow it up with solo movies for each core member of the justice league warner brothers basically tried to take a shortcut and so 2016's batman v superman introduced not only batman but also wondelman the flash aquaman and cyborg the latter three appearing in piecemeal stapled on cameos it was painfully clear that warner brothers was just desperately trying to speed things up in order to get a justice league movie going as fast as possible except batman v superman's polarizing response and commercial underperformance ultimately forced the studio to suddenly change tack and revise the already shooting justice league into a more light-hearted affair this did nothing to address the fact that audiences hadn't yet been invited much to care for the likes of the flash aquaman or cyborg and so with only superman and wonder woman having their own proper solo movies before justice league was released in 2017 it wasn't terribly surprising that the superhero epic failed to strike a chord with much of the audience the only saving grace here is that it could have actually been a lot worse because warner brothers actually listened to what people were saying about batman v superman and changed the script accordingly rather than just shoving it out of the door in a very short-sighted fashion but still oof number nine not planning out the sequel trilogy star wars now in fairness you can point to many mistakes made by the star wars franchise as a whole the prequels alone letting george lucas have free reign the excessive reliance on visual effects and over-explaining aspects of the law namely the force that were just better left ambiguous yet the handling of the star wars sequel trilogy has left all but the most forgiving fans totally exasperated as it quickly became painfully clear that producer kathleen kennedy had no clear vision or throughline the force awakens may have been too much of a retread of new hope but it at least built a firm foundation from which new stories could be told the last jedi was conversely the boldest and most daring star wars film since the empire strikes back albeit one whose subversions heavily divided the fan base but then along came the rise of skywalker to unpick all the changes made in the second film and deliver more trite over sentimental fan service stepping back from the trilogy and looking at where they went it's embarrassingly obvious that there was no wider road map for the stories or the characters within them though having everything set rigidly in stone in advance isn't really a good idea either the fact that there wasn't a defined set of a to b to c beats before the force awakens began shooting is frankly ridiculous number eight stretching two movies into three the hobbit the success of the lord of the rings movies left everyone wondering when peter jackson would get around to adapting the hobbit into a film though in a classic monkey pause moment the decision was ultimately made to adapt the book into an entire trilogy of films now given that the hobbit was a single novel and much shorter than any of the lord of the rings books a two film adaptation was already pushing it but with guillermo del toro originally attached to direct and peter jackson taking up the mantle following his departure it was easy to have faith that the text would be done justice right yet shortly after principal photography on the duology wrapped jackson announced that the hobbit was now a trilogy with the director going on to shoot 10 weeks worth of additional scenes in order to flesh things out though the resulting trilogy of films were monstrous box office hits grossing almost 3 billion dollars combined the general critical and fan consensus was that the three movies were wildly bloated clocking in at a total of almost eight hours the trilogy was criticized for straining to deliver three epic blockbusters worth of quality entertainment and surely the single most divisive edition was the original character inserted into the trilogy who ends up embroiled in a cringe-worthy love triangle subplot looking back it's clear that the three-movie split was made purely for cynical commercial reasons than because there was actually a trilogy's worth of stories to tell number seven killing amanda way too soon soar i mean where to begin with the soar franchise what started out as a low budget one million dollar horror film ballooned into a mammoth franchise that counts nine entries among its number to date with box office grosses totaling over one billion dollars now many fans will cite saul's biggest mistake as killing off villain john kramer aka jigsaw at the end of saw three kramer's presence was so magnetic that most of the subsequent sequels shoehorned convoluted ways for him to linger on in the periphery yet the biggest group was actually in presenting a fitting successor to kramer only to kill them off in the very next movie saw two's biggest twist is that kramer's victim amanda from the first film is actually his apprentice and was evidently set to take jigsaw's mantle after he succumbed to his cancer yet saw three made the utterly bizarre choice to not only kill off kramer but also amanda who was shot dead by test subject jeff at the film's end as a result saw four had to go to the effort of introducing yet another apprentice detective hoffman who remains a fairly divisive figure amongst the fan base given that amanda was well liked by fans it was extremely silly to kill her so early leaving the colossal void which the filmmakers then scrambled to fill with the likes of hofmann having amanda and hoffman battle over jigsaw's legacy could have actually made for a much more intriguing finale than the convoluted mess that we ended up with but for reasons that will never really be clear amanda got offed in bizarrely premature fashion number six trying to turn it into a blockbuster franchise predator it's absolutely fair to say that the predator franchise has forever been struggling to match the brilliance of john mctiernan's 1987 original at least predator 2 offered up an intriguing urban switch-up and 2010's predators was entertainingly action-packed even if neither got close to their predecessor but with 2018's the predator fox had massive ambitions to effectively reinvent the franchise shifting away from its action horror roots and into big budget blockbuster territory armed with a mighty 88 million dollar price tag literally the combined budget of the three previous films the predator aimed to transform the franchise into a larger scale universe of movies this is despite the fact that nothing in the prior movies had indicated predator would benefit from interconnected relentlessly sequalized storytelling the brutal efficiency of the original film is what made it work so well and the strength of both predator 2 and predators is that they're more or less standalone this is all without getting into the fact that the predator went through a strain production process rife of reshoots and was widely lambasted for a head-scratching subplot involving weaponized autism yes seriously amid negative reviews and general audience apathy the predator was a massive box office disappointment pumping the brakes on all the planned sequels in the process fittingly the upcoming next entry in the series prey is a smaller scale lower budget horror film closer to the style and tone of the original film and will be forgoing a theatrical release entirely on paper it certainly sounds like a better fit for the series attempting to recapture the blunt essence of the 87 original rather than reshaping it into something it categorically isn't number five constantly retconing the story terminator if there's a very strong argument to be made that the first two terminator movies are so perfectly executed as to make any further sequels pointless there was at least potential for more stories to be told within this space the problem inherently has been the infuriating lack of internal consistency with regard to the storytelling which has been retconned numerous times in an attempt to jolt the flagging franchise back to life while not strictly a repcon terminator 3 got the ball rolling by undoing the neatly tied off ending of t2 and surmising that judgment day was in fact inevitable at least it had the courage to commit to its brilliantly apocalyptic ending though terminator salvation largely avoided doing much to disrupt the established continuity but the fifth film terminator ginei seis decided to ignore the events of salvation and basically soft reboot the series by having skynet alter the existing timeline giannis ice and i will always call it that because of the stupid spelling either remixed or wiped out the events of the first two films in the hopes of creating a launching pad for a new trilogy but its commercial disappointment sent the producers back to the drawing board and so a few years later terminator dark fate arrived which once again tinkered with the continuity by forgetting most of the sequels and instead operating as a direct sequel to t2 however the ill-advised decision to kill off a young john connor in the opening scene immediately soured many fans on the rest of the film which honestly could have been worse much like star wars the lack of a plan really hurt terminator but rather than try and fix the existing scenario the producers insisted upon continuity negating reboots that quickly eroded audience investment in the franchise with dark fate sinking like a stone at the box office it's looking likely that the movie series might actually finally be terminated itself number four trying to tie standalone movies together daniel craig's james bond daniel craig's run on the james bond movies are generally accepted to be one of the stronger outings for any double 07 actor though the key creatives made one big mistake and that was in trying to connect these standalone stories into an overarching narrative casino royale got craig's tenure off to a roaring start while quantum solace effectively served as a direct sequel tying up bond's revenge arc for vesper's death skyfall was back to standalone business as usual but trouble abounded when craig's penultimate film spectre offered the ham-handed revelation that blofeld was not only bon's adoptive brother but also had been pulling the villainous strings all along spectre went to convoluted lengths to reveal that blofeld had been behind every bad thing that had happened to james since casino royale and felt like a desperate attempt to cash in on the nascent popularity of interconnected cinematic universes this combined with the sibling twist made it all feel a bit well kind of austin powers craig's recent final outing no time to die was then lumped with the undignified task of making sense of specter's mess and to its credit did actually stick the landing rather than ignore spectre's clunky storytelling it managed to make somewhat better sense of it by delving deeper into blofeld as a character even if it's unfortunate that craig's batch of movies got bogged down with this nonsense to begin with hopefully the next later bond films will opt for more singular adventures that are connected only by loose morsels of shared continuity and character development number three the totally ridiculous timeline x-men the x-men franchise is undeniably instrumental in popularizing superhero cinema but even beginning to think about its pretzel-shaped timeline is to invite a major cluster headache after the original x-men trilogy wrapped up in 2011 we saw the release of x-men first class a rock-solid prequel which slotted perfectly into the existing continuity but then its sequel x-men days of future past made the bold decision to weaponise time travel to basically jettison unsavory aspects of the franchise that both fans and director brian singer hated namely the deaths of jean grey and cyclops in x-men the last stand at this time this felt like a fairly novel solution before hollywood then began using time travel and alternate timelines on mass to rectify their creative carelessness but x-men really started to become unstuck with its subsequent prequel sequels which hurried to barrel forth in time and catch up to the original 2000 x-men movie between 2011's first class and 2019's dark phoenix 30 years of story time had passed and yet the central characters all looked comically young for their supposed ages most notably by the time that dark phoenix came around xavier and magneto were apparently in their 60s yet looked in their 40s at the very most the prequels made it clear that neither brian singer nor simon kinberg cared too much about nurturing a consistent passage of time and so audiences unsurprisingly stopped caring as well by the time the series sputtered out with dark phoenix it had become a sad sorry shell of its former greatness number two repeatedly killing off cherished characters alien much like terminator the first two alien movies are bona fide masterpieces after which mileage definitely began to massively vary and alien 3 would be the one to commit the original sin that would taint the rest of the franchise the opening moments of the film revealed that aliens beloved characters hicks and the young newt both died brutal deaths during cryostasis again leaving ripley as the lone survivor considering the bomb that ripley shared with hicks and newt and how hard she fought to save newton aliens it felt like a massive slap in the face to dispose of them in such perfunctory fashion and the hits kept on coming though as alien 3 also saw ripley become impregnated with a xenomorph embryo herself and in the final moments of the film throw herself into a furnace to prevent its birth so the audience's final tactile human connection to a franchise was dead and if that had been the end of aliens perhaps it might have worked but alien resurrection arrived five years later and had to overcome the awkward issue of how to revive the series without its beloved heroine and the answer well just bring ripley back as a human xenomorph clone who is conveniently able to recall some of her original memories due to the xenomorph's genetic memory it's glorified fan fiction and underlined just how much of a mistake it was to kill ripley if the series was going to continue ironically alien resurrection's commercial underperformance caused it to end the original run of alien movies and it was another 15 years before fox tried again with the prequel prometheus yet seemingly having learned nothing prometheus introduced audiences to the intriguing new heroine elizabeth shaw and also the mysterious alien race known as the engineers only for the sequel alien covenant to kill both shore off screen and swiftly nuke the engineers out of existence cheers for that and number one making laurie and michael related halloween the halloween series is such a roller coaster ride of ups downs and pure wtf decisions that is difficult to point to any one mistake as causing the slasher franchise's downfall but surely its most spectacularly ill-advised gaff was deciding to reveal heroin laurie as the secret younger sister of murderer michael myers in halloween 2. while the original film derived enormous terror from the chilling randomness of maya's attacks adding a personal dimension to the boogeyman's rampage undermined and even cheapened it and from that point on save for the entirely unrelated halloween 3 season of the witch the series became shackled to the lorry michael relationship even when lori was nowhere to be seen the fourth film the return of michael myers had laurie die off screen due to curtis's refusal to return but in order to keep the familial dynamic going introduced laurie's daughter jamie lloyd as the new protagonist though jamie lloyd became something of a fan favorite she ended up dying by michael's hand in the curse of michael myers but of course she also had her own young child who michael now pursued eventually lori's lineage became twisted enough that curtis agreed to return for the seventh film halloween h2o or h20 however you want to pronounce it 20 years later which retconned the last three films in order to bring laurie back to life both this film and its maligned sequel halloween resurrection were still hopelessly married to the concept of laurie and michael being family as were rob zombie's two divisive reboot movies it wasn't until 2018's halloween that the familial link was finally severed once and for all acting as a direct sequel to the 1978 original it threw out every subsequent sequel and flat out stated that lori and michael being related was total yet for almost four decades the franchise kept up this silly charade one which massively constrained its storytelling potential and there we go my friends those are the ten biggest ever movie franchise mistakes i hope you enjoyed that and please let me know you thought about it down in the comment section below as always i've been jules you can go follow me over on twitter at retro j with a0 or you can swing by live and let's dice that's dice with a c where i do all of my streaming outside of work and it'd be great to see you over there my friend but before i go i just want to say one thing even though we detailed today a lot about movie franchises that make mistakes they're made by humans and to er is to be human my friends and we all make mistakes in life so don't beat yourself up for mistakes that you've made in the past and if you have the capacity i urge you to forgive those who have possibly made mistakes against you in the past as well because if you can it will allow you to go forward and live a healthy and happy life and at the end of the day that is all i want from you alright don't be afraid to make mistakes but please i urge you to learn from them that's the most important thing as always i've been jules you have been awesome never forget that and i'll speak to you soon bye

Channel: WhatCulture

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Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 15 2022