We live in a word where horror franchises comfortably run into double digits, an entire Transformers trilogy is on the way after six previous films of wildly varying quality, and Terminator got rebooted three times in a decade to no avail. As haunting as that is on its own, it also makes it even more frustrating for fans who invested in the opening chapter of a would-be series that ended up being placed on the chopping block before its time.
Of course, money has always and will always speak loudest at the end of the day in Hollywood, with plenty of one-and-done features failing to catch fire at the box office. And yet, Redditors are still struggling to reconcile with the ones that got away, leading them to pay respects to the fallen failed franchises they desperately needed to see more from.
Shane Black’s The Nice Guys always tends to come up when this conversation rears its head, as does Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Unfortunately, both of them bombed in spite of winning widespread praise, and folks evidently aren’t over it just yet. Similarly, the latest chapter in the phenomenal Jump Street saga remains lodged in development hell, and the same goes for Jason Statham’s bonkers Crank.
One of the more surprising mentions finds a large number of users agreeing that Ridley Scott should finish off the trilogy he began with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, even if Disney’s acquisition of Fox looks to have permanently nipped that one in the bud. Too many franchises have gone on for way longer than they should, but just as many didn’t get the opportunity to thrive that they deserved.