IMO movie franchises can JTS. Here are when some “jumped”. Thoughts on these and franchises I forgot
Goodfather: Part III
Star Wars: the prequels
Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Aliens 3.
Jaws 2.
Diamonds are Forever, when silliness became mandatory. I guess they bounced back with License to Kill, though.
Aliens.
Some people may say Superman III (the one with Richard Pryor), but I actually liked that one (although not as much as I or II). Superman IV is when the series really went down the crapper. The story was pretty bad, and the special effects were abysmal.
Not a Bond fan, but Moonraker was also pretty dumb/not Bond-like.
“Jumping the shark” doesn’t just mean “got bad.” It’s specifically a reference to when a series is already getting worse and tries to use a gimmick to get popular again.
I can’t really think of any movie series that jumps the sharks the way TV series do, just because there aren’t many movie series with enough instalments.
The only series that really is long enough is the Bond series, and it did get silly in the Roger Moore years. However, it subsequently got better.
Rick-“jumping back” is possible.
So, the first Star Trek movie doesn’t count?
Well, yeah, the range from Diamonds are Forever (Sean Connery’s last film, if we disregard Never Say Never Again which itself was pretty silly) to License to Kill covers all of Roger Moore’s movies (including Moonraker) plus The Living Daylights (Timothy Dalton’s first).
It started to get silly again for the invisible car in Die Another Day and the Madonna cameo, but only briefly, thank goodness.
It’s okay to tolerate a lot of crap for the “pilot episode”, as it were - since the bugs are still being worked out. In more recent term, I thought the 2009 Star Trek reboot film was truly awful, but I can afford to be cautiously optimistic about the upcoming sequel, since if the franchise can rebound from the dreadful Star Trek: The Motion Picture to the awesome of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, then the 2013 sequel to Star Trek deserves a fair shot.
Similarly, if Star Trek: The Next Generation had never risen above the level of Encounter at Farpoint, it would’ve lasted three seasons, tops. Tragically, I thought Enterprise was cancelled just as it was finding its footing, but it was unfortunately two seasons too late.
If it did, when did Potter jump?
When they started wearing Muggle clothes at school
I just recently watched the 4 resident evil movies back-to-back in a sort of marathon. I would by no means argue that any of them are “great” or even very good movies, but the first 2 were good for what they were, and the 3rd jumped the shark when Alice had real amazing psychic super powers (a gimmick thrown it to keep the series going, so it really fits the definition of jumping the shark). Luckily they took it away in the 4th movie right at the beginning (although it made absolutely no sense how she and Wesker survived).
So making the best movie in the series is jumping the shark now?