This is timely because they’re turning the movie series into a TV show: in the Librarian movies the titular librarian gets the girl in each movie. And she has dumped him by the time the next movie starts.
At least that has some payoff. The examples I was looking for were the ones where you are made to (or they attempt to make you) care about a relationship throughout a movie and then it is completely invalidated and dismissed by something that happens off screen in between movies.
Yea, of all these examples, Die Hard was the most realistic for me.
Their marriage was on the rocks in the first one, a one-time event usually doesn’t change that because the underlying people didn’t change. Sure, the wife is grateful she’s not dead, but that doesn’t solve the emotional problems or long-distance issues that put the marriage on the rocks in the first place. Same with the second movie. The most unrealistic part of the third is when he tries to call her from a pay phone. Let it go already.
The first Indiana Jones sequel was actually a prequel. Since we know Indy screwed Marion and dumped her, that was probably something better left off-screen. In addition, Marion was supposed to be quite a bit younger than Indy, so while they could get away with a few-years-older Harrison Ford playing a younger Indy, it would have been more awkward with using Karen Allen as Marion, and at any rate, the female character in that film was the polar opposite of Marion. So if it came down to recasting the role with a younger actress who looked like Karen Allen, and then showing her all naive and squeamish, which would be her previous traits before being involved with Indy-- the writers didn’t want to go there, and it was probably a good idea. Better to have an entirely new character. Whom Indy also discards. He’s actually a bit of a shmuck.
I don’t even remember who the love-interest was in the third movie, but IJ & the Last Crusade was filmed, IIRC, around the same time that Karen Allen was appearing in The Glass Menagerie on Broadway, so she may not have been available for it, and at any rate, it was really about Indy’s relationship with his father, not with a woman. Allen may not have been interested in a really minor role.
I’m not sure what the (now zombie) OP was asking for, but if it’s “loves that don’t die (until the sequel” , then the entire James Bond series counts. Bond didn’t carry over a female from one book to the next, and the movies were pretty much the same. The only sort-of exceptions in the films were Bond’s perpetual flirting with Miss Moneypenny and Sylvia Trench, who shows up as Bond’s kinda girlfriend in both Dr. No and From Russia with Love. The running joke with her was that they would just be getting started, and Bond would be called on a mission, breaking things up. They decided to drop that after the first two films.
Post-Fleming writers of biographies of Bond and pastiches tried to show Bond continuing relationships with Tiffany Case or with Pussy Galore (as in the latest pastiche, Anthony Horowitz’ Trigger Mortis), but they invariably break up after a short period together.
Of course, Bond was briefly married to Teresa “Tracy” Vincenzo at the end of both the film and the book of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but she got killed off, preventing any sort of continuity except emotional. Bond’s vengeance for her death carried over into the next book, and the movies made fleeting direct or indirect reference to it (Diamonds are Forever, For Your Eyes Only, License to Kill)
It’s their own fault. Humanoids traveling in hyperspace is inherently risky. EVERYBODY knows that!! They should have read the fine print on their tickets!
Been a long while since I’ve seen either movie, but from what I remember Mike Douglas and Kathleen Turner are a solid couple at the end of Romancing the Stone, then they hate each other by the beginning of Jewel of the Nile. At least, the sequel (which was otherwise crummy) addressed the issue that the couple had created a relationship on a basis of romance and adventure…which doesn’t last.
John and Lori finally get married at the end of Ted, but Mila Kunis (Lori) didn’t return for Ted 2 so they got divorced in the meanwhile and the female lead/romance subplot was replaced by Amanda Seyfried.
And the Douglas/Turner partnership ends with hilarious catastrophy in The War of the Roses, which just goes to show that regardless of how good it is, the pâté cannot hold together a marriage.