Some long-running franchises soon run out of interesting stories, and they retread old ground instead. If these derivative sequels don’t live up to the originals, they can come across as cheap parodies, leaving fans incredibly frustrated. Star Wars, Jurassic World and Indiana Jones have all tried to relive their glory days by creating approximations of their best movies, but this approach rarely garners positive results.
Self-parody may sound intrinsically negative, but there are some franchises which use it well. James Bond, for example, often has 007 fighting bad guys in a sharp suit and an Aston Martin, just like he did all the way back in the 1960s. These signifiers are beloved franchise traditions, and they help the franchise maintain its identity despite recasting the characters so frequently. Self-parody can be either positive or negative, and this usually depends on how intentional it is.
The Jurassic World franchise has been a box office juggernaut, but it hasn’t always won over critics. Each installment has a lower Rotten Tomatoes score than the previous one, with Dominion sitting at a painful 29%. The visuals can often be outstanding, but this is just about the only way that the newer movies have developed Steven Spielberg’s 1993 masterpiece, Jurassic Park.
As Jurassic World 4 races toward a summer 2025 release date, it remains to be seen whether the new era that Universal has promised will differentiate itself in any meaningful way. So far, The Jurassic World franchise has been a more technologically advanced parody of the original movies. Humanity refuses to learn any lessons in Jurassic World, thinking that meddling with nature just one more time will be fine. To nobody’s surprise, it usually ends with a load of people being eaten by dinosaurs. This predictability has seen diminishing returns for the franchise.
James Bond is one of the longest-running franchises of all time, so it’s no surprise that some of the movies become a little repetitive. Although the spy franchise has gone through several different phases, there are still plenty of tropes that even the newest movies can’t seem to shake. Daniel Craig’s 007 was darker and grittier than ever before, but his movies were still the same old James Bond in many ways.
The franchise reached the peak of self-parody in the 1970s and 1980s, with campier installments that reveled in the absurdity of the sci-fi gadgets and James Bond’s almost-supernatural ability to cheat death. The newer movies are somewhat more grounded, but there are still “Bond girls” and villains with facial scars hiding in their extravagant lairs behind a stream of nameless goons. Bond 26 will mark a new era for the franchise, but some things never change.
Home Alone has strung out a franchise that should only work for one movie into six installments spanning 31 years. Each movie features a child left unsupervised who has to fight off some burglars using elaborate booby traps. Home Alone‘s quality took a huge hit after Macaulay Culkin quit the franchise, and each subsequent sequel has tried and failed to recapture the magic of the first two movies.
The Home Alone franchise has never seemed to understand what makes the first two movies so special. While there may be burglars and booby traps in every sequel, none of them have a compelling emotional arc. After all, Home Alone is a Christmas movie, so it needs to deliver a big emotional payoff. The last four Home Alone movies have all felt like bad parodies of the first two.
Star Wars may have evolved into so much more than what it originally was, but it has often struggled to deal with the legacy of George Lucas’ explosive first trilogy. The often-maligned prequel trilogy had its own unique problems, but the sequel trilogy tried to retread familiar ground, even though this too proved to be controversial. Almost 50 years after the franchise’s conception, the originals are still the best Star Wars movies.
There was a lot of expectation hanging over The Force Awakens when it first came out. Anything was possible in this new era of the franchise, but these lofty expectations also heaped a lot of pressure on the seventh movie in the Skywalker saga. The end result is a movie that plays it too safe by trying to mimic the originals. In a universe of endless possibilities, Star Wars chose once again to tell the story of an unexpected hero who travels from a desert planet, learns the ways of the force, and ultimately helps destroy a planet-killing weapon.
Comedy franchises rarely have legs, especially when their premise is so unique. The appeal of The Hangover is not the characters, it’s the wacky situation that they find themselves in. It was such a massive box office success that a sequel always seemed likely, but there were obvious concerns about where the story could go. Instead of coming up with something new and developing the characters further, The Hangover Part II tells the same story, but in Thailand instead of Las Vegas.
The Hangover Part II was an even bigger financial success than the first movie, but it didn’t come up with enough fresh ideas to win over critics. The Hangover Part II even acknowledges how derivative it is, with Stu (Ed Helms) screaming that he can’t believe the Wolfpack have gotten themselves into the exact same situation, but they do so again in Part III and Bradley Cooper has said that he’d be interested in The Hangover 4.
Scream combines horror with elements of a murder mystery, as viewers are urged to guess who is behind the iconic Ghostface mask. Some of the Scream franchise’s traditions are so predictable that they have become extremely popular among fans. Everybody who watches a new Scream movie knows that they should expect the first character on screen to be brutally murdered within about five minutes, for example.
The Scream franchise started its self-parody in just the second movie. Scream 2 introduced the in-universe Stab franchise, which allows Scream to retell its own stories with even more gore and exaggeration. This kind of self-awareness has added another layer of complexity to Scream‘s whodunnit formula. Characters will state plainly where they are in a franchise, whether that’s a legacy sequel or a reboot, and they will also predict which characters are most likely to die based on other movies.
Steven Spielberg’s original Indiana Jones trilogy from the 1980s introduced one of cinema’s most iconic adventurers, and it ended his story perfectly. However, Indy was too much of a box office draw for just three movies, so Last Crusade‘s ending, with Indy and his friends riding off into the sunset, was just the beginning of a new era. The underwhelming Kingdom of the Crystal Skull resurrected the franchise in 2008, and 2023’s Dial of Destiny finally wrapped things up.
Dial of Destiny was a box office bomb, which highlights how far the franchise had fallen. It seems like a hollow parody of earlier, more interesting adventures. Dial of Destiny is set during the 1960s, and it could have shown an aging Indy in a whole new kind of story. Instead, he once again grabs his hat and bullwhip and tries to stop nazis from getting their hands on a powerful and mysterious artifact. The opening sequence, with some questionable de-aging technology, is not the only part of the movie which tries to relive the franchise’s glory days.
The Ocean’s franchise does self-parody in the best way. Originally a remake of a Frank Sinatra movie from the 1960s, Ocean’s Eleven proudly did its own thing, and it created the blueprint that many subsequent heist movies have tried to follow. The rest of the franchise has also copied its own success in some ways, while making a few knowing nods to the audience along the way.
There’s no real reason that Ocean’s Eleven should have had a sequel. The movie ends with Danny Ocean being released from prison and driving off with Tess and Rusty, ready to enjoy their new fortune. Both sequels are fairly contrived, but they have fun with this fact, as evidenced by Julia Roberts’ character using her uncanny resemblance to Julia Roberts to help the team on a heist. An Ocean’s Eleven prequel with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling could restart the franchise again, after the mediocre Ocean’s 8 failed to do so.
The Expendables assembled a formidable unit of classic action stars, including Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren and Jason Statham. It was half a tribute to old-school action movies, and half a sly parody of the genre’s outrageous excess. As the franchise continued, it began to parody its own absurdity in some ways. Even more new characters were added to an already bloated cast, and the explosions became bigger, louder and more frequent.
The Expendables franchise knows just what its audience wants, but its appeal has been waning as the initial novelty of the action star team-up has worn off. If there is any future for the franchise after The Expendables was a critical and commercial flop, then it needs to stop rehashing the same old story and the same old shoot-em-up action set pieces. Sadly, the newer cast members weren’t very popular either.