Warner Bros.
From Captain America: The Winter Soldier to Mad Max: Fury Road, there have been some terrific sequels these last few years, but if you tried counting them on both hands, you?d still have five fingers too many.
The law of diminishing returns holds true for most franchises, although these days there seems to be an added caveat: not only will one of the sequels disappoint you, it will steal your time and money, insult your intelligence and pummel you with an over the top visual style for two and a half hours. But enough about Batman Vs Superman.
You don?t watch a sequel expecting to see compelling characters, quotable dialogue and white-knuckle action scenes. You watch because the first movie had all of those things, and you?re curious to see how badly they?ve been mangled this time round. Sometimes the filmmakers acquit themselves well, but other times they give you Thor: The Dark World.
Studios come up with all kinds of nonsense to justify making sequels. They had to make it because the audience demanded to know what happened to the characters. They had to make another one because there was so much more of the story to tell, so much rich wonderful story. That?s why there are three Matrix movies instead of just one.
Some franchises improve as they go along, but most wither and die. Here are 10 that withered.