Film Franchises - touchy subject, I know...

(This article is from the September 2007 issue of The Ryder)


Film Franchises – Dominating Every Theater near You

Spider-Man 3. Shrek the Third. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Rush Hour 3. The summer of 2007 is going to go down in cinematic history as the summer of threequels. Yes, "threequels" cannot be found in Webster’s Dictionary, but how else is one supposed to describe the plethora of movies released this summer that just so happen to be the third installment in a franchise?

Spider-Man 3 was one of the most anticipated movies this past May. With plot points from the popular Marvel comic books, the first two Spider-Man films each grossed hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide. The third movie continued with this franchise’s monetary successes, but all you got was an emo Peter Parker strutting down the street doing some rejected Saturday Night Fever dance moves. Spider-Man 3 made me wish they had stopped after Spider-Man 2, but Spider-Man 4 is coming out in 2009.

Another franchise that needs to stop now is the Shrek series. Shrek the Third had new celebrity voices like Justin Timberlake, but the movie itself was wordy, the plot line of whether Shrek was ready to be a parent or not and the crass humor that the Shrek movies are laced with was more appropriate for parents, not children. Shrek the Third raked in the money earlier this summer (over $320 million) and it has been announced that The Next Shrek (that’s the title, folks) and a Puss in Boots spin-off (again, that’s actually the title) will both be released in 2010.

The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise echoes back to the Matrix series: the first movie was so successful that the studio ordered up two previously unannounced sequels to be shot and released back to back in hopes of banking on the first movie’s popularity. Unlike the Matrix sequels which were awful compared to the first Matrix movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End were just as successful, if not more so, than the original Pirates of the Caribbean. The Pirates movies have grown into one of the more successful movie franchises in recent history, bringing in over a billion dollars worldwide, and as of right now, there is not a fourth movie in production. This comes as a relief to moviegoers who appreciate when a series ends on a good note rather than extending its welcome.

With the resurgence of decades-old franchises, this summer one of the bigger hits in theaters was Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth Die Hard movie which comes twelve years after Die Hard with a Vengeance. John McClane is older, but still has snappy one-liners and gets into some crazy awesome fights, which in reality should have killed him. A fourth Die Hard movie was never needed, but now that it is out there and actually a respectable film, we can accept it into the already solid Die Hard franchise.

It makes you wonder why studios are taking the risks to expand on movie franchises that already had satisfying final films. Many movie lovers have seen the original Indiana Jones trilogy and will agree that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was a great way to end the series. Indy chose wisely, got the grail, saved his dad’s life and they rode off into the sunset. Now that it’s eighteen years later and Harrison Ford is eighteen years older, just how much mayhem can Indiana Jones get into before he breaks his hip? Hopefully the next Indiana Jones film, like Live Free or Die Hard, will turn out to be a good film and an asset to the series rather than attempt to fix a franchise which was never broken.

While movies adapted from books have also created franchises (i.e. the Harry Potter and the Jason Bourne movies), those franchises are justifiable because there are multiple books in the series, leading to multiple movies, which also happened to be monetarily successful. But, just because a lot of people went to see I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry this summer doesn’t mean that there needs to be a Chuck and Larry 2 coming soon to a theater near you in 2008.

I probably shouldn’t have written that… I don’t want to give the movie studios any crazy ideas.