What happened two or three decades ago means squat. That’s why I mentioned names from the past who are still around and making movies and irrelevant to the conversation.
A star isn’t permanently tattooed on your forehead. What have you done for me lately? is the first commandment of Hollywood.
Tom Cruise used to be a star and is now a franchise player. He can’t open a movie by himself. What he did in 1986 is as relevant as what Ian McKellen did. Or Bruce Willis.
But in the last decade – you said the last decade, right? – JACK REACHER hit theaters, and earned more than 3.5x its budget with a top-billed Cruise, which is why the sequel is set to come out this fall; it did so well that it became a movie franchise for him to play around in.
Damon and Affleck had stuff fail to break even in the past decade while Cruise was more than doubling the budget of all his star turns – which, yes, was also the case when Damon and Affleck had stuff fail to break even while Cruise was more than doubling the budget of all his star turns the decade before that, just like he did the decade before that – but even just sticking to recent history, it’s still true.
The son and his mother Emily (Kane’s first wife) were killed in a car crash a few years after the marriage ended. Alright, you can ignore it in a sequel if you want.
Heh. Reminds me of the based-on-a-true-story example from the previous thread: CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN was a huge hit in 1950, but ends on the downbeat note of, well, the dad dying. But like I said, it was a huge hit, and so Mom raised the kids on her own in the 1952 sequel, BELLES ON THEIR TOES.
That seems a little short sighted. There’s tons of stuff for Moses to do if you cobble a story from the rest of Exodus and the wandering in the desert times. And if you do that sequel right, you would use it to introduce all the characters who lead the tribes into the promised land in Numbers. That way, you get your third movie even if Moses has to die at the end of the second.
By my count, there were 16 Blondie movies with Arthur Lake and Penny Singleton between 1938 and 1950. Churned them suckers out, they did! 
I had a hazy recollection that something like that happened but a quick glance at some plot summaries didn’t list it. Oh, well. Might have to watch it again. The last time was in grad school which … wasn’t exactly yesterday.
There was a made-for-TV version of Exodus (the Book, not the movie) with Bert Lancaster as Moses, back in the '70s. I forget exactly where it ended, but I do remember Aaron (Anthony Quayle, IIRC) leading a service for the first time with the Vulcan salute (both hands)! 
Well, even in the Golden Age…
“Going My Way” led to “Bells of St. Mary’s” and “Father of the Bride” spawned “Father’s Little Dividend.”
In between, “Sitting Pretty” earned Clifton Webb an Oscar nomination for fielding the role of Mr. Belvedere – so he came back for “Mr Belevedere Goes To College” in 1949 before doing “Mr Belvedere Rings The Bell” in 1951.
A better parallel is Hillary running around she will let her husband run the economy when he is not sexually assaulting women.
If you look at the movies that Hollywood considers “the best” Oscar winners (which tend to be fairly but not obscenely profitable and usually uplifting) the golden era of sequels was the late 1960s 1970s…French Connection, Godfather, In the Heat of the Night, Rocky. There were a few in the 1940s but it’s gone back to being rare again.
The same thing exists in video games, or so I have the impression. You tend to get endless iterations of “Grand Theft Auto”, “Halo”, “Far Cry”, “Madden NFL”, etc. When you are spending a lot of money on a film or a game, you want a certain amount of “built in audience”
Both were bestselling books first. The sequel was begging to be filmed.
If we’re making sideways associations, this reminds me of Ruth McKenney. She and her sister Eileen moved to Greenwich Village from Ohio. Ruth wrote their adventures as stories for The New Yorker. The stories were published as a book, My Sister Eileen, and made into a 1940 play - which opened four days after Eileen’s death in a car crash. (She died with her husband, the famous writer Nathaniel West.) *My Sister Eileen *was made into a movie in 1942, a radio series in 1949, and a television series in 1960. In 1953, the stories were turned into a Broadway musical, Wonderful Town, which inevitably became a film, in 1955.
Oh, and the radio show My Friend Irma was so similar that a radio writer sued successfully. That didn’t stop it from becoming a movie (introducing Martin & Lewis for no good reason) and a movie sequel and a tv show and a comic strip and a comic book.
Anybody who thinks that franchises are something new needs to spend some time studying media history.
For another 1930s franchise, Peter Lorre went from THINK FAST, MR MOTO – back when audiences were cool with that, is my point – to THANK YOU, MR MOTO and then MR MOTO’S GAMBLE, and MR MOTO TAKES A CHANCE, and MYSTERIOUS MR MOTO, and MR MOTO’S LAST WARNING, and MR MOTO IN DANGER ISLAND before wrapping things up with MR MOTO TAKES A VACATION.
But these days, you cast Johnny Depp as Tonto and suddenly a would-be franchise gets nervously backed away from, see.
Not the earliest, but pretty early, was the movie The Cohens and the Kellys(1926) which spawned six sequels. The first two were silent, the rest with sound.
I saw the first one last February at the Kansas Silent Film Frestival. It was a hilarious comedy, with a wonderfull happy ending. The Cohens and Kellys (1926) - IMDb
Out of curiosity, given that the new TARZAN film comes out next week – as was the case the 1910s, and the 1920s, and the 1930s, and the 1940s, and the 1950s, and the 1960s, and the 1970s, and the 1980s, and the 1990s, and the 2000s; sometimes with sequels and sometimes with remakes – I can’t help but wonder: are you including that character in the category of comic-book/superhero types?
I actually reject the premise of the thread. My most accounts, Jaws was the first summer blockbuster and that spawned like horrible sequels. So by that definition, the studios learned the lesson immediately.
Cruise would seemed to have hit his peak in 2005 with War of the Worlds. I still like his films though. And Cruise still tends to make lists of top movie stars.
Interestingly, Until the new Jack Reacher movie comes out, Mission Impossible was Tom Cruise’s only sequel.
For me, it’s not the presence of a lot of sequels (extremely common for a long time), nor the occasional remake of a very old movie, but rather the seemingly lazy remaking of movies that are 20-30 years old that were successful at the box office, like Robocop, Total Recall, Conan the Barbarian, Clash of the Titans, Friday the 13th, Karate Kid, Fame, Nightmare on Elm St., Red Dawn and Annie, just to name a few.
It’s like they just saw the dollar-signs from the old movies, without actually realizing or researching WHY these movies were so popular, and re-made it without most of the charm or interesting aspects that made the originals successful.
To me, it’s the laziest and most awful kind of filmmaking- it’s not remaking a classic story, it’s not an original story, it’s taking something that was successful, digging it up, spackling and painting the corpse, and then hitting it with jumper cables in hopes of making a quick buck.
Again, while WAR OF THE WORLDS outgrossed his MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE outings domestically, the $694 million raked in by GHOST PROTOCOL was a bigger hit worldwide. And likewise for last year’s ROGUE NATION, at that.
So he hit a peak in America in '05 – the year he jumped on Oprah’s couch, and talked down to a ‘glib’ Matt Lauer about psychiatry and Scientology, and criticized Brooke Shields about post-partum depression, and, seriously, you’d expect stuff like that to maybe end a career upon making someone into a punchline – but he kept starring in movies, franchise and non-franchise, that debuted at #1 just fine.
(And like I said, headlining a franchise isn’t an auto-win button; plenty of 'em curl up and die as folks stay away in droves. First you have to make a film that folks want to see, which is where some fail; and then you have to make a sequel that folks want to see, which is where others fail; and sometimes the third is a disappointment and then there’s no fourth, and so on; so, yeah, Cruise hit it out of the park five times playing the same character – but lots of movie stars who were willing to so reprise a role weren’t able, because who’ll throw good money after bad to make it happen?)
Well, yeah, but the aforementioned WAR OF THE WORLDS was a remake.
(And so was VANILLA SKY, I guess.)
That said, TOP GUN 2 is apparently now a thing that is happening; will there be harrumphing admirals who insist that drones can efficiently outfly any human pilot, until a cocky hotshot with something to prove starts using unconventional tactics? Look, the thing pretty well writes itself, is what I’m saying.
And two of the pilots will be out gays instead of homoerotic friends.*
Well, maybe one of the pilots will be forced to come out to protect his buddy. That would work, too. Always subject 10 years from Hollywood understanding of any minority culture.
Was waiting for someone to mention the Blondie films, which is a data point I bring up every time someone starts moaning about ‘all the comic book movies they’re making these days.’