I was also going to say Indiana Jones, but I’m one of the outliers as to not being particularly a big fan of the original movies, but i, at least, acknowledge some quality to them. So much so I wasn’t fully sure there was a movie after Crystal Skull (which I turned off, it was stupid). Some even say Last Crusade was bad, but I’d have to like the others to really acknowledge that.
Terminator movies could kind of count, except they keep trying to make them when the series should be dead.
What about James Bond movies? The Bond franchise has run from 1962 to present day and shows no signs of petering out anytime soon. Have there been no bad Bond films along the way? Have there not been consecutive bad Bond films? Yet another point, what exactly makes a ‘bad’ Bond film? The franchise appears to be more or less immune to the normal effects of franchise decay.
Star Trek 2, 4, and 6 were good, 3 was OK. I liked both Generations and First Contact, but not the other TNG films. The reboot was a decent film, but arguably not Star Trek. I don’t remember much about the other reboot films which is probably not a good thing.
Indiana Jones - 1 and 3 were good, 4 was not. I thought Dial of Destiny was at least ok.
Matrix 2 (other than the chase sequence) wasn’t very good, but I think some folks saw 3 just to be completionists.
The rise and fall somewhat, but are consistent enough to never reach true burnout.
One thing they generally did for along time was ignore continuity. They rarely referenced previous movies. Once in awhile they did, but each film stood on its own for the most part.
Daniel Craig’s films, though, broke this trend. Most films in his run were direct sequels that mentioned events from the previous Craig movies.
I think his run broke the sequel trend. He made one absolute stinker (Spectre) and then came back and made a good one to end his run. I also am in the minority in that I really like Quantum of Solace, Craig’s own least favorite of his run.
I think you put your finger on it. This more than anything else is what sets the franchise apart. There’s, of course the voluntary suspension of disbelief expected of audiences when Sean Connery turns into Roger Moore or George Lazenby etc. but in terms of the stories, they’re pretty much two dozen standalone movies (with the notable exception of Daniel Craig) and each of them has adhered to a successful formula. The formula has been modified over time to appeal to contemporary audience sensibilities over more than 60 years (e.g. no more secret lairs filled with uniformed mooks working for an evil mastermind who captures Bond, magnanimously offers him a martini - shaken not stirred - explains his plans and arranges an elaborate Rube Goldberg-esque demise for our hero from which Bond inevitably escapes with seconds to spare), but certain things have remained constants throughout (eg. open the film with an action sequence, Q giving Bond some sort of unlikely/cool device that’s useful in an oddly specific circumstance which Bond inevitably ends up in, encountering a femme fatale, at least one good chase scene, etc.).
I think the Daniel Craig versions of the 007 films are very much a response to the success of Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible films. The “architecture” of the movies seems to be more patterned on the Cruise films than the prior Moore or Brosnan films.
My contribution to the discussion is Highlander(1986), which I think would have followed the pattern the OP was talking about…if there had been any sequels to Highlander.
As we all know, there were no sequels to Highlander.
How about The Fly (1957)? It was followed by The Son of the Fly (1959) (AKA “The REturn of the fly”), which was made on such a low budget that it was in black and white (the original was in color) and had cheapo superimposition effects. They followed it with the forgettable Curse of the Fly (1965).
The second Fly series sorta fits. The first The Fly (1986) was directed by David CRonenberg and was very good – not really a remake, but more of a re-imagining. THe sequel, The Fly II was awful, and directed by the special effects guy from the first movie. It was so bad they never had a second sequel.
I would disagree with this, I think they are a response to the Bourne Films, which is one that follows the pattern described above. The first two were good, and the third had some good moments but then the 4th kind of killed it (I’m skipping the Renner one).
I think the Bond films are different because they were re-creations of a series of books, so they don’t exactly count as sequels in the way I feel it usually works. That is come up with some story, add a bunch of actors who make the whole thing work and then, when successful try to find another story that will make that same thing work again. With Bond you have a bunch of stories already, you aren’t trying to figure out another story that fits the characters, because those stories already exist. Yes, the books for a large part were mostly ignored, but the template had already been repeated in book form anyway.
Yes, all the early Bond screenplays were based (to varying degrees of faithfulness) on Ian Fleming’s stories, but they haven’t made a Fleming based movie in about 40 years. I think Living Daylights was the last one. Every Bond film since has been an original screenplay. Now one could certainly argue they carried the template forward with every movie since, but for the last four decades the way they’ve been created is more akin to the way sequels are generally made nowadays… there’s this interesting action-oriented character that conducts difficult missions, gets in a fight or two, conducts some espionage, meets the femme fatale, hunts down the bad guys, a chase scene ensues, and Bond saves the day and gets the girl. The end.
