Surely you mean Phyllis Thaxter? :dubious:
why'd the film world take a long time to learn that lazily making sequels and remakes is sure money?
Uh, no. Surely you mean Phyllis Coates?
I mean, you’d still be wrong, but you’d be missing it closer.
It was 1995, only renamed as Showgirls.
No, there used to be a lot more theaters and probably more screens. Back in the thirties and forties even small towns would have a movie theater. Television and then vcr’s hurt the movie theater business and a lot of local theaters closed.
But people were also becoming more mobile. They no longer depended on neighborhood businesses. So businesses became more centralized. Instead of ten local grocery stores, you’d have one big supermarket. And movie theaters went the same way; it’s cheaper to show ten movies in one location than to show one movie each in ten different locations.
I stand corrected! 
Showgirls didn’t follow the plot of A Star is Born. It followed the plot of All About Eve.
Seeing as how Kane died in the first scene of Citizen Kane, not sure how a sequel would work. “Kane II: Still Dead!”
I stand corrected, but I’m confused. Noel was the original Lois Lane in 1950, but was replaced by Phyllis in Superman and the Mole-Men in 1951, and then replaced Phyllis as Lois Lane on The Adventures of Superman in 1953?
There has to be a story behind that … doesn’t there? 
You are right, obviously, I meant that the A Star is Born of the 1990’s was Spice World.
(Or, less jokingly, you could go for 1998’s Little Voice, starring Jane Horrocks and Ewan MacGregor.)
No real story there. After the first season wrapped shooting, the producers suspended the show in order to find a national sponsor. When they had locked in the funding to start the second season, Coates had moved on to another series and was unavailable, so the producers called on Neill to replace her.
There were two movie serials about Superman made by Columbia Pictures, which starred Kirk Alyn as Superman and Noel Neill as Lois Lane. The first, simply called Superman, was made in 1948. The sequel, Atom Man Vs. Superman, was made in 1950.
In 1951, the film Superman and the Mole Men was made, starring George Reeves and Phyllis Coates. It was independently produced, released by Lippert Pictures, and had no connection to the Columbia serials apart from the source material. It was done mainly as a trial run for a proposed TV series.
It must have been successful enough, because the TV series, The Adventures of Superman, was made for original syndication, and began broadcasting in 1952. Phyllis Coates again played Lois in the first season.
By the time of the second season, in 1953, Coates was unavailable, having committed to another project. Noel Neill was hired, and played Lois for the remainder of the series.
Everyone knows it only works if the title character is named Bernie. 
Kane II: Rosebud’s Revenge - “He came back from the dead, to get vengeance for his sled!”
Admit it, you would watch this movie.
Back to the Future II and III were filmed simultaneously long before the LOTR movies. Admittedly, they were pretty sure they’d do OK, given the first one.
Sure, I’m not saying that LOTR and the Star Wars prequels were the first in doing that. I’m saying that they were the ones that made it on such a scale and with such a success that they changed the Hollywood model from then until now.
But I’m sure that back-to-back movies have been happening for ages. I bet that the Tarzan films were shot in a similar fashion.
Fun fact: before all of that, Republic Pictures started work on a Superman serial in the '40s, only to scrap it because they couldn’t secure the rights. But they’d gotten props! Stuntmen had been hired! A script had been written!
So they did a half-rewrite of the script: our hero still chats with journalist Lois about the killer robot designed by that mad scientist – sure as our hero gets into costume and does whatever Superman would’ve done – only without any powers.
So he overpowers a crook high up in an office building, and makes the guy talk by dangling him over the ledge – which, sure, a strong man could do, I guess. And upon learning what the nefarious gang is up to on a speeding train, he can catch up to it and leap on board – since he knows a guy with a souped-up car. And when everyone on a passenger plane is in danger, it turns out our hero can fly – his own little plane up there, and parachute out of it, to save the day.
And so on. Once you’re looking for it, you can’t not see it: he’s in a situation where even Superman couldn’t rush in, because the kidnappers inside that shack can pull the trigger if they hear a warning from their lookout – so our hero has to sneak up on that lookout, and drop him with one punch. Why was it written that way? Oh, right. Our hero gets shot in his civilian identity, and slumps to the floor as if dead – and then switches into costume to pursue the criminals? Oh, that’s why they threw in that plot device when his adopted father was telling him about the biological parents he never knew! Everything keeps falling into place!
Sequels (or franchises) today tend to be the Big Tentpole “A” features; those mentioned so far as example of franchises of the past (series movies starring Ma and Pa Kettle, Andy Hardy, the Bowery Boys, Hopalong Cassidy, etc.) were “B” pictures. They were reliable money makers for their studios: costs were low and audiences were assured.
And that’s a key difference: movie series of the past came out of studios. The same studios were making “A” pictures that in the main were adaptations of the latest best sellers, but whatever the sources, the studios were budgeting for those “A” pictures from their own coffers. They could, if they chose, make a ‘prestige’ feature film that had no best-seller behind it, because they were playing with their own money.
With the demise of the studio system the dynamic changed. “B” pictures became the domain of the independents, and today’s studios distribute the tent-pole movies that are (usually) created by production companies that each own a much smaller part of the movie-industry pie than was true for MGM, Paramount, Fox, et al. in the 30s and 40s. “A” pictures today are, for the most part, each separately-financed entities. So to get the astronomical amounts of cash needed to make a movie that will win its opening weekend, filmmakers must offer a proven audience-pleaser (as others have already said in this thread)–with the result that we get a lot of sequels to previously-successful comic-book blockbusters.
As for the missing mid-1990s iteration of A Star is Born: it’s The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Young Andy becomes the protégé of Red, and under Red’s wise advice Andy makes a name for himself, garnering popularity and influence (and the will to enrich himself and escape). In the meantime Red’s trajectory is downward. He is humiliated and degraded, to the point where he seriously contemplates suicide.
Of course in this version he does not kill himself, but up until that point the plot doesn’t diverge much from the older versions of the tale.
As a nitpick - LOTR wasn’t shot back-to-back. The movies were shot simultaneously - they shot scenes for all films as sets & actors were available.
And that’s still quite a rarity. It required that the scripts for all 3 movies be pretty much set in stone before they start filming. None of the big movie franchises since - MCU, Star Wars prequels, X-men, Harry Potter, Transformers, etc. have been filmed that way. They’ve all had separate filming and reasonable time frames between releases. In fact, I suspect The Hobbit is the only other movie franchise filmed that way since LOTR.
ETA: You’re wrong about the Star Wars prequels too. Phantom menace filming was in 1997, released 1999. Attack of the Clones was filmed in 2000, released in 2002, and Revenge of the Sith was filmed in 2003, released in 2005. So there was never any overlap, and they didn’t even start principal photography on the sequels until the previous movie had been out for months.
Additional fun fact: Republic had also figured out a way to do flying effects. So when they couldn’t get the rights to Superman, they approached Fawcett, who published Superman’s biggest rival character. Which is how The Adventures of Captain Marvel came to the screen in 1941, a good seven years before the Superman serial, and with flying effects that blow Columbia’s animated flying Superman out of the water.
Or- wait for it-* Boogie Nights.*