I grew up with Sequel-Per-Year franchises. Has this stopped? Or am I not noticing?

Cafe Society
1

I recently rewatched the Nightmare on Elm Street films and was thinking about how the sequel-per-year trend seems to have fallen out of fashion. Am I missing any franchises from the past decade that have turned out a sequel per year? It seems more time is taken to develop the sequels with the goal being better quality control (I am not suggesting this goal is always achieved) rather than rushing into the next installment.

When I was growing up, sequel per year was so much the norm that I never thought anything of it. Looking back though, to anyone older and more media aware I’d imagine it could have seemed ridiculous- each year’s film offerings practically identical to the previous years film offerings:
Friday the 13th: 1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989… 1993
A Nightmare on Elm Street: 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1991… 1994
Police Academy: 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989… 1994

The interconnected Marvel/Disney movies are coming out at more than one per year but it’s a franchise made of of different individual properties with the various titles staggered. It’s not an Iron Man movie every year or a Thor movie every year.

Even looking at arguably low-brow franchises, they seem to take at least two years:
Fast and Furious - 2001, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017
Alvin and the Chipmunks - 2007, 2009, 2011, 2015

The only one I can think of off the top of my head:
Saw - 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010
There are probably other Horror examples, I don’t really follow Horror franchises.

Note: I am discounting film series that are based upon book series because, in these cases, the continuation of the story is already established by the book author before the first film even goes into production. I’m only talking about original films intended to stand alone until they prove to be box office hits prompting the decision to make a sequel.

2

Not all sequels were per-year. The James Bond franchise, for instance, put out an entry every other year for most of the time between Dr. No and License to Kill. But they were big-budget flicks. Heck, it was three years between each of the first Star Wars films.

3

The movies you mention were cheap and easily made. Franchises these days are special-effects heavy, and that takes time to get right. Bad special effects would kill the franchise, but not in the past.

On your list, only The Fast and the Furious isn’t CGI heavy (though they use them), but it requires spectacular stunts, which take time to design and execute effectively.

4

They also didn’t spend that much time writing and polishing their scripts.

5

Paranormal Activity was close to one a year (2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015) and so was The Conjuring (2013, 2014, 2016). Star Wars will apparently be at one film a year for the foreseeable future.

But overall, I’d say that most franchises weren’t ever sequel a year. You listed three series that were basically a sequel a year, but Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, The Omen, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Smokey and the Bandit, The Naked Gun, The Pink Panther, Karate Kid, Rocky, and many other series more often had two or more years between movies.

6

The first thing that came to mind was Paranormal Activity, but since that was already mentioned, how about Saw:

2004 Saw
2005 Saw II
2006 Saw III
2007 Saw IV
2008 Saw V
2009 Saw VI

EDIT: The Final Destination series isn’t one-a-year like Saw, but almost perfectly every three:

2000 Final Destination
2003 Final Destination 2
2006 Final Destination 3
2009 The Final Destination
2011 Final Destination 5

7

Insidious gets bonus points for still being actively produced:

2010 Insidious
2013 Insidious: Chapter 2
2015 Insidious: Chapter 3
2017 Insidious: Chapter 4 (announced release date of October 20th, 2017)

EDIT: Two more franchises with lots of parts but several years between installments are Underworld and Resident Evil. Both are still active, having scheduled releases in 2017. (Resident Evil may be on its final release, though, with The Final Chapter scheduled for January.)

8

I think another factor is that studios make fewer movies now. The average studio new releases about half the number of movies each year that they did twenty years ago. Fewer slots in the production track means movies get spaced out more.

9

Still waiting on Kill Bill 3 alt title Kill Bill Z