As we all know, movie franchises that have a lot of sequels generally tend to really start to suck (Friday The 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street, Police Academy, etc).
So what movie franchise has been consistently good to at least pretty good through 3 or more sequels?
The Shrek series comes to mind…Star Wars, although that’s certainly debatable around here (and please lets not nitpick about the later/earlier sequence of that series!). Indiana Jones.
Star Trek movies have been generally good.
What else? What movie series has had the most quality titles before it too succumbed to jumping the shark?
There’s also the Inspector Clouseau series, starting with The Pink Panther which lasted more than three films before shark-jumping, and has been rebooted several times (Alan Arkin played the character at one point, as has Steve Martin, and at one point they tried to center it in Clouseau’s nephew)
Even as a massive Tarzan fan I’ll be the first to say that most of the films are bad. Of the (official) Tarzan films there’s only maybe 5 or 6 that I’d say were genuinely good or great films, and only a handful more that I’d say were fun and enjoyable, but not really good. The rest are either bad in a boring way (E.G. that snoosefest called The New Adventures of Tarzan), or just bad in a terrible way (E.G. Tarzan of the Apes 1959 or 1981)
I suppose that should count. I absolutely love those movies, particularly Robert Downey as Iron Man and Ed Norton’s Banner/Hulk.
How did I possibly overlook The Bond series? Crap. That’s got to be the best choice as it spans so many decades, has multiple lead actors and has produced so many good movies.
So is the consensus the James Bond movies then? Is there any other series of movies that surpassed its breadth and scope?
In my opinion successful franchises that keep their appeal are a relatively recent phenomenon - although it depends if you treat (for example) the Laurel & Hardy films as a movie franchise, rather than a Laurel & Hardy franchise, as individual movies that had Laurel & Hardy in them. I think of the Marx Brothers films as being different to, for example, the Thin Man series. The former had a bunch of comedians acting out their comic personas in otherwise unrelated comic adventures, the latter had the same characters acting their parts in the same universe, with a rough continuity. And there are borderline cases like the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies, which started in the 1800s and then magically he was fighting Nazis, and (mind bursts)
Still, there was a time when the sequel was always rubbish, and there was no third film, or it went straight to video. Successful, long-running franchises that manage to maintain a decent level of quality and boffo box-office were very, very rare until the last decade and a half or so. Toy Story, the Spiderman films, the loose X-Men series, Pirates of the Caribbean, the Harry Potter movies. Particularly the Harry Potter movies, which must hold the record for the longest, consistently decent - not stellar, but none of them are bad - financially successful linked film franchise, aside from the Bond movies. Can you imagine what a burst mind looks like? Brains aren’t white, they’re red, because they’re full of blood. Like a flower, splutch, opening up. Decayed into mist.
My pet theory is that it’s all down to the Burton / Schumacher Batman films. For a time it looked as if the Batman franchise could keep going indefinitely, despite the vastly different approach to the material that the two directors took. Of course it fell apart with Batman & Robin, and no-one in Hollywood wants to be the man who greenlit and masterminded the franchise-killer, so now franchises tend to be even more conservative, a bit blander, more anonymous, but more consistent with it. There aren’t as many triumphs, but there aren’t as many disasters either. None of the Fast and Furious films are masterpieces, but they’re consistently profitable and are released into cinemas.
In a wider sense you could tie it in with the stagnation of celebrity culture. Time was when celebs came and went; now transient bubblegum pop stars seem to hang on in the public eye forever. Another topic.
Casting my mind back, the Planet of the Apes series had about three films’ worth of goodness. The first was great fun; the sequel was dire; the third one was actually not bad - the bit with the man painting a painting of a man painting a painting always sticks with me - the fourth was sort of okayish, from what I remember, but needed to be a lot darker, last was just the dismal 1970s in a nutshell. The aforementioned Thin Man films stood up pretty well for a while.
The original run of James Bond films were hit and miss, although that’s a slightly different case, in the sense that each film is more or less a stand-alone entity, with sometimes wild variations of tone and approach. E.g. For Your Eyes Only (despite starting with a direct reference to an earlier film in the series, which was very rare) is completely different to the preceding film, Moonraker. Moonraker had invisible spaceships and humanity-destroying space plagues, For Your Eyes Only had a Cold War tussle over a Royal Navy encoding device. Octopussy grafted the two extremes into one film. It’s as if each entry belongs in its own separate universe.
The Rocky franchise, there’s another one. You can sense Stallone actually trying to come up with a way to extend the story that makes sense organically, instead of just rehashing the same ideas over again, or doing the old cop-out of taking the original star and putting him in a different location. At least he tried. And, dammit, the first four are entertaining in their own way. The fourth is entertaining and hilarious. And entertaining. Especially if you grew up in the 1980s.
The, er, Rambo franchise. Alongside Alien, another example where the filmmakers tried to do something different with each film, following a relatively sober original with a straightforward but well-made action film, and then an indulgent load of rubbish that had a troubled production, and then a go at modernising the whole thing. You know, the four Rambo films would be a good centrepiece for some kind of event involving drinking whilst watching television with other people who are drinking, and also girls (who are drinking). It’s an unlikely fantasy - girls don’t like Rambo - but a man can dream? Eh? A man can dream.
I just saw (most of) Song of the Thin Man on TV the other day. The last and not the best. Keenan Wynn plays the sort of fast-talking jazz clarinetist that only existed in old movies. But William Powell is always good; and nobody did upper-class snark like Myrna Loy.
Someone should mention the Die Hard series; one classic, two over-the-top-but-entertaining, and one I haven’t seen enough of to have an opinion. That’s not a bad batting average.