Movie Sequals So Bad They Killed a Franchise

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Movie studios love nothing more than a franchise, but Hollywood has its limits when it comes to putting good money after bad. Even the widest brand recognition isn’t always enough to keep the sequels coming. Here are some particularly infamous examples of movies that sent their franchises back to the drawing board…or killed them off completely.

The Batman franchise kept right on rolling through three leading men over the space of four films in the ’80s and ’90s. But it all came to a screeching halt with 1997’s Batman & Robin, which found George Clooney taking over the starring role. Director Joel Schumacher’s campy tone—which started with Batman Forever as a deliberate attempt to honor the ’60s Batman TV series and was ratcheted up even further with Batman & Robin—felt like a step back after the somewhat more serious earlier installments in the franchise. The studio started developing a sequel even before Batman & Robin arrived in theaters, but wretched reviews and disappointing box-office grosses brought those plans to a halt. It would take nearly a decade, and director Christopher Nolan’s far grittier outlook, to bring a rebooted Caped Crusader back to the screen with 2005’s Batman Begins.

Star Trek had a pretty remarkable run at the box office, firing off 10 films in 23 years while ruling the syndicated airwaves with a small army of TV shows. By the early aughts, however, the franchise had arrived at an uncomfortable crossroads. The low-rated Star Trek: Enterprise was its last show remaining on the air, and grosses for the films had been solid but unimpressive over the three sequels since the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation took over for the original crew. It all added up to a reduced budget and an action-heavy approach for 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis, neither of which were a good fit for the thinking-person’s sci-fi for which the series had always been known. Opening in a year-end blockbuster rush that also included Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Bond sequels, Nemesis was all but ignored at the box office—probably a good thing, considering the disastrous reviews. This installment’s crash landing was enough to keep Star Trek out of theaters until J.J. Abrams rebooted the franchise in 2009.

The original Beverly Hills Cop was one of the funniest films of the ’80s, but the law of diminishing returns weighed heavy on its sequels. After striking comedy gold with Eddie Murphy as a fish-out-of-water Detroit cop in sunny L.A., the studio doubled down on action set pieces at the expense of the sharp humor that gave Cop its added kick. The swollen price tag that went along with Murphy’s increased celebrity didn’t help. With 1994’s Beverly Hills Cop III, the franchise completely lost its way, putting Murphy’s Detective Axel Foley in the midst of a convoluted and downright dull amusement park mystery that all the tailpipe bananas in the world couldn’t fix. There have been numerous attempts to put together a Beverly Hills Cop IV over the years, but they’ve all died in development.

The Blade franchise had years of comic stories to draw from, Wesley Snipes in his prime, and plenty of kung fu vampire action. All the ingredients were there to keep the sequels coming after 2004’s Blade: Trinity, in other words. But this third installment’s middling reviews and disappointing grosses were only part of an epic collapse that started unraveling while the cameras were still rolling. Snipes—who in addition to starring in the lead role was also a Blade producer—reportedly engaged in all sorts of eccentric behavior behind the scenes, like trying to strangle the director, among other things. He was so unhappy after Trinity’s release that he ended up suing the studio. In the years since Trinity flopped, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has helped make superheros big business, but Blade, a Marvel character, has remained on the sidelines.

Fewer film franchises have endured a faster fall from grace than the RoboCop series. The 1987 original was a critical and commercial smash, and unlike a lot of hit films, its storyline had all sorts of obvious sequel potential. Star Peter Weller departed after 1990’s disappointing RoboCop 2, which wasn’t that big of a deal since his mouth was the only part of his body not covered by his futuristic super-suit. But even if he’d stayed, it’s unlikely that RoboCop 3 would have been a hit. The studio was busy going bankrupt during filming and the violence was curtailed in an effort to make things more accessible for younger fans, leaving the end result a low-budget shell of the original. RoboCop 3 sat in the vault for a year before limping into theaters in 1993, and it’d be another 11 years before the franchise returned with a reboot. Meanwhile, a sequel to the reboot remains a question mark as of this writing.

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