That troubles me more than anything.  You have a franchise that is astounding and gave you a few stellar movies that shape or affect you, but then have one or two films added on later that mar the entire series.  So instead of having a fantastic series, people only ever remember how bad the last ones were.  Look at poor Spider-Man 3.  This film was definitely sub-par, but Spider-Man 2 was one of the first comic book films that became ridiculously successful, finally breaking the bad-comic-book-movie curse.  Now you can hardly talk about it without someone saying “yeah, but 3 sucked”.  A barrier breaking film gets set aside, completely ignored because of a lackluster sequel.

I guess we can’t really blame the studios.  It’s the basic supply and demand concept.  If a movie makes a lot of money the studio can reasonably assume there is a demand for something else similar or the same characters.  The problem is they rush to get the next film out so fast; they ignore the quality of the script.  I am talking about two particular franchises on this one: X-men and Pirates of the Caribbean.

For me a series needs to go away when you start losing original actors and major members of the crew (i.e. director, executive producers, script writers).  I understand with X-Men there are plenty of stories to tell, but the writing wasn’t that strong in Wolverine and they really messed with some of the established characters (to the point I don’t want to see another movie with them in it).  The prequel line of X-Men is a franchise I will not be crying to keep around.

As for Pirates, I love the films and I’m positive I’ll go see “On Stranger Tides”.  Another indicator for me that a series needs to die is when the story is finished.  The Pirate trilogy ended and the story about Davy Jones and the Black Pearl are over.  There were no real loose ends to tie up (Beckett is dead, so is Jones).  When they have to make up an entirely new storyline with new antagonists and protagonists it’s probably time to take a step back and evaluate the necessity of the film.

Those are not the only two series that need to be put to pasture (so to speak), but those are my primary examples.  Will the studios ever stop? No, not likely, but that doesn’t mean we have to support those films either.