Will Summer Bring Franchise Fatigue?
We look at the blockbuster sequels headed for theaters in Summer 2023 to see which ones are picking up steam — and which are falling from favor.
Even if you think blockbuster sequels and spinoffs are everything wrong with Hollywood today, everybody acknowledges that these long-running franchises make money. That’s why so many big-budget follow-ups premiere every summer, including five new installments of beloved film sagas debuting this summer. But while it’s true that audiences are drawn to movie theaters by what’s familiar to them, it’s also true that, for franchise fans, nothing really lives up to the first time — at least, most of the time.
The most popular and long-running movie franchises still eventually fall victim to the law of diminishing returns. The longer a series of films goes on, the more difficult it becomes to reproduce the magic of the first movie. After a certain point, it comes time for studios to accept that the sequels have stopped being profitable and put their franchise to bed (or at least wait a few years before producing a reboot). But when exactly is that point? According to the research we conducted on Ranker Insights, it depends on the franchise.
We looked at five cinematic universes that are putting out new films in summer 2023 and looked at how each movie in each franchise is viewed by our readers in terms of sentiment score (the overall ratio of votes that convey positive feelings to those that convey negative ones). While most of them are gradually losing favor with their fans, a few are actually getting more popular as they go on — a pretty remarkable feat when you consider these franchises are releasing their fifth, sixth, or even 11th films this summer.
TRANSFORMERS
AVERAGE SCORE: 46%
TREND: +1%
FRANCHISE PEAK: Transformers (52%)
FRANCHISE VALLEY: The Last Knight (35%)
NEXT FILM: Rise of the Beasts (June 9, 2023)
Michael Bay’s explosive live-action take on the classic 1980s cartoon show was a hit at the box office, so much so that it spawned five follow-up films in the last 16 years, with a sixth on the way in early June. But while these movies always manage to bring people to the theaters, moviegoers also understand them to be quintessential summer blockbusters: fun, thrilling, and full of action, but not exactly Academy Award material. That could explain why only one movie in this hugely popular franchise has been approved of by a majority of voters, with 52% of all votes cast for the original Transformers indicating positive sentiment.
But the upside to earning modest scores from our voters is that there’s plenty of room for growth. It turns out that, movie to movie, each successive film in the franchise gets a sentiment score that is, on average, 1% higher than the previous. Even though the line graph above trends downward more often than it does upward, Bumblebee’s score was so much higher than The Last Knight’s (14 percentage points higher) that it tilted the trend upward. This suggests that, at the very least, the Transformers franchise hasn’t worn out its welcome with moviegoers quite yet.
THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS
AVERAGE SCORE: 51%
TREND: -6%
FRANCHISE PEAK: Fast & Furious 6 (72%)
FRANCHISE VALLEY: F9: The Furious Saga (36%)
LATEST FILM: F10 (May 19, 2023)
No franchise on this list, and few in the history of film, can compare to the output of Fast and the Furious. With 10 films in the series out since the 2001 premiere of The Fast and the Furious, plus a spinoff in Hobbs & Shaw, the saga has released as many installments in 22 years as Star Wars has in 46. But as the action series continues to produce more movies, fans’ opinion about those movies seems to be trending in the wrong direction.
The Fast and the Furious franchise has had an interesting trajectory — it seems as though the first two sequels, 2 Fast 2 Furious and Tokyo Drift, failed to live up to the standard set by the original. But the fourth film, Fast & Furious, eclipsed the benchmark set by the first. The trend peaks at the sixth film in the franchise, Fast and Furious 6, with 72% of votes cast indicating positive sentiment (the highest score for any movie covered in this blog besides Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which also has 72%). After that, however, it’s all been downhill. Despite its touching tribute to late star Paul Walker, Furious 7 got a sentiment score 14 percentage points lower than its predecessor. Fate of the Furious broke even with 50% positive votes, while Hobbs & Shaw and F9 got more negative votes than positive ones. We didn’t include vote totals for F10, since it’s been out for less than a month as of the writing of this blog, but the last we checked, its sentiment score was just 30%, the lowest score for any movie not just in this franchise, but in any of the franchises we’ve covered here. That seems as strong a sign as any that the franchise is losing steam.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
AVERAGE SCORE: 60%
TREND: +2%
FRANCHISE PEAK: Tie between Rogue Nation and Fallout (64%)
FRANCHISE VALLEY: Mission: Impossible II (51%)
NEXT FILM: Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning (July 12, 2023)
Mission: Impossible is another example of a franchise that breaks the rules of how franchises are supposed to work. Though the 1996 original is popular, with 61% of all votes cast for it indicating positive sentiment, the general rule for the series is that the more Mission: Impossible movies they make, the more beloved they are. Because the films never dip below the 50% mark, the trend in growth is modest, with each movie building on the sentiment score of the previous one by an average of 2%. Still, considering that the most popular installments in this 27-year-old franchise are the two most recent, there’s no reason for Paramount not to greenlight more sequels after the release of Dead Reckoning in July. If the current trend holds, the seventh film in the franchise will have an even higher score of 73%. But even if it doesn’t, the data indicate that producers could release a few more installments that are less popular before the franchise begins to sour with moviegoers.
INDIANA JONES
AVERAGE SCORE: 65%
TREND: -10%
FRANCHISE PEAK: Temple of Doom (72%)
FRANCHISE VALLEY: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (47%)
NEXT FILM: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (June 30, 2023)
Indiana Jones premiered in a different era, back when the trilogy was the largest kind of film franchise anyone could imagine (outside of slashers like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street). And given that this franchise consists of only four movies, the last of which premiered nearly 20 years after the previous one, we don’t have a stupendous amount of data. But the basic learning from this trend is clear: Fans loved the original three films and hated the 2008 Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which explains why the trend in sentiment of -10% film-over-film points is such a dire direction for the coming Dial of Destiny. That’s not to say that this new (and purportedly final) film is doomed. It just suggests what the producers likely already know: it will have to overcome some skepticism from fans still reeling from the disappointment of Crystal Skull.
Still, in this relatively small pool of data, some interesting points do jump out — for instance, it’s pretty surprising that fans are less approving of Raiders of the Lost Ark than of the other two films in the original trilogy!
INSIDIOUS
AVERAGE SCORE: 62%
TREND: -5%
FRANCHISE PEAK: Insidious (70%)
FRANCHISE VALLEY: The Last Key (55%)
NEXT FILM: Insidious: The Red Door (July 7, 2023)
Blumhouse’s immensely successful strategy has been to produce dozens of low-budget horror films knowing there’s always an audience for them. It’s a straightforward tactic, so it’s appropriate given that the trend of one of its more popular franchises, the Insidious movies, is similarly straightforward.
The first Insidious film enjoys a very strong sentiment score of 70%, while every successive sequel has dipped by approximately five percentage points: from 70% to 65% with Chapter 2, from 65% to 58% with Chapter 3, and from 58% to 55% with The Last Key. That suggests, of course, that the upcoming Red Door film will get an even 50% of voters approving of the movie, a fine place for Blumhouse to call it quits. Then again, maybe the Red Door will reverse the trend and renew fans’ interest in the franchise.
