8 Movie Franchises Where Every Film Is The Same

April 5, 2024, 4:05 p.m.

Movies

8 Movie Franchises Where Every Film Is The Same

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Summary Fast & Furious saw a significant shift from street racing to high-octane action after Fast Five.

Ghostbusters, Transformers, & Indiana Jones maintain repetitive patterns in their storytelling.

Saw, The Hangover, Ice Age, and Scary Movie focus on recurring themes and storylines across each movie.

Franchises are currently dominating the box office and are highly coveted by studios seeking to make the biggest return on their investment, but as a result, some franchises do end up with incredibly repetitive movies. While movies having sequels and even trilogies have long been a part of cinema, franchises have never had the same presence as they do in the current cinematic landscape until the last two decades. With ever-expanding superhero franchises, and action, horror, and even comedy all appearing in franchises.

Most franchises tend to have movies that share some core themes, styles, and even characters, but they tend to change the narrative and move on to new stories in each new entry. Something like Harry Potter had a great balance with the same core characters and even the same overarching villain, but each movie had a new set of events to explore and opened up a new side of The Wizarding World. However, other franchises don't always shake things up so much and become repetitive over time.

Related 7 Movie & TV Franchise Attempts That Failed Twice As popular properties appeared just too good for studios to leave idle, some franchises were given the opportunity to fail not once, but twice.

8 Fast & Furious

Franchise length: 10 movies

Kicking things off, the Fast & Furious saga does have very obvious differences between the first couple of movies. The series began as a dedicated street racing movie with fast cars and underground racing. Some sequels even introduced a brand-new cast of characters and new parts of the world. However, since Fast Five came out in 2011, the series shifted gears and hasn't looked back.

After Fast Five, the stories focused on high-octane action, bordering the superhuman and fantastical in a way resembling superhero movies, while always revolving around heists and running from authorities. The movies have fallen into a pattern of having the same cast, the same high stakes, and the same formula of big impossible stunts with cars being props to pump up the action. This isn't to say the movies aren't entertaining, and some of the most popular films in the franchise came after this point, but it has become formulaic in its approach.

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7 Ghostbusters

Franchise length: 5 movies

...they all feature the Ghostbusters being shunned by the public, only to win the trust of the City by the films end

Ghostbusters is an unusual series in terms of exploring new and unique ideas. The idea of a franchise that sees a group of highly intelligent people who hunt ghosts and eradicate the supernatural could be taken in any number of directions. Even if the series wanted to stay put in the familiar location of New York City, there is enough scope and room to explore a wealth of different and unique stories.

Despite this, in four movies and one reboot, two of the movies see the team deal with the same ancient deity Gozer, three have the antagonist being an actual deity, three end with a giant creature wreaking havoc in New York City, and they all feature the Ghostbusters being shunned by the public, only to win the trust of the City by the films end. All of that is good, but it does feel as though the reset button is hit after each movie, and the next entry follows the same template with minor variations.

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6 Transformers

Franchise lenght: 8 movies

Transformers is a challenging franchise to get right in live-action. The films require epic scale, incredible CGI, and compelling robot battles to be worthy of the Transformers title, and only so much extra storytelling and nuance can happen around those pillars. Despite changing the protagonist in multiple movies, it tends to follow a human hero, who is unaware of the wider world of aliens, and they are chosen to help the Autobots live out a peaceful life on Earth. However, there is a significant threat in the form of the Decepticons.

Add to this several huge explosions, jetting around the world on private military aircraft, and briefings with high-ranking government officials, and it's a paint-by-numbers Transformers movie. There does appear to be some hope for the franchise as the upcoming movies will be animated, which opens up what they can do on a budget and will see the stories focus on the homeworld of the Transformers robots themselves. Until then, the movies have all had far more in common than they have had differences.tra

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5 Indiana Jones

Franchise length: 5 movies

Indiana Jones is another franchise that has struggled to break out of its self-made niche. The first movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, introduced supernatural elements that the extremely skeptical Indy largely refused to reconcile as he chose to believe in things that could be proven by science. However, in the following films, Indy keeps up this tough exterior, rejecting supernatural or extra-terrestrial elements until many years later, despite witnessing things that would make anyone else an all-out believer.

As Harrison Ford has aged out of the role, there was an attempt to bring in a younger character as his son to replace him, but after backtracking on that idea, the franchise simply chose to use CGI to de-age Ford and bring back the classic hero. With Ford playing the same character, and being the heart of the franchise, as he displays a gruff attitude on fantastical archeological trips, every story tends to play out in fairly similar ways that make the franchise appear stale and repetitive.

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4 Saw

Franchise length: 11 movies

...the movie can end up feeling like an exercise in the mundane

Horror films tend to find a popular character or concept, and then drill into that same idea over and over and over again. Horror is not always known for its creativity, but even when a movie is designed around the deranged creativity of a man who forces others to appreciate and alter their lives like in Saw, the movie can end up feeling like an exercise in the mundane. In almost a dozen films, a dying man and his group of disciples inflict incredible torture on petrified and unwitting victims who are supposedly being punished for their misdeeds.

The Saw franchise continuously sees people waking up in the middle of terrifying traps and deadly escape rooms before the ominous Jigsaw lays down a challenge for them to overcome. These people must make terrible choices, and do awful things to supposedly earn their freedom. In each movie, the only thing that changes are the traps, but the premise, the race against time, and the twists remain constant in every entry.

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3 The Hangover

Franchise length: 3 movies

The Hangover Created by Jon Lucas , Scott Moore First Film The Hangover Cast Bradley Cooper , Ed Helms , Zach Galifianakis , Justin Bartha , Ken Jeong , Jeffrey Tambor , Sondra Currie , Sasha Barrese , Gillian Vigman

Most comedy movies tend to be standalone, and when analyzing a comedy franchise like The Hangover, there may be clues as to why that is the case. Comedy is a great and versatile genre where characters get into ridiculous situations and do what they can to come out the other side unscathed. However, a comedy franchise like The Hangover tends to have a central premise that it clings to, and then simply rehash that same idea.

For example, The Hangover movies tend to revolve around a group of three best friends, and tag-along Alan (Zach Galifianakis), going on a wild bachelor party trip. In each movie, the boys wake up with a foggy memory about the night before, and someone missing. Often, there is a wild animal in their hotel room, and their adventures have them come into contact with celebrities and increasingly bizarre events. Each movie does the same thing, with very little variation, but they are all entertaining, despite being repetitive and one note.

2 Ice Age

Franchise length: 6 movies

A group of ragtag animals form a unique pack, and together they must face the incoming natural disasters

Ice Age may be a family film exploring ancient eras in the Earth's history, but the movies all tend to tell a very similar story on repeat. A group of ragtag animals form a unique pack, and together they must face the incoming natural disasters that threaten their future. Through their difficult journey, they become closer than ever before, and despite having different backgrounds and being different species, they find common ground and grow closer together.

In multiple entries, they face an incoming ice age, global warming, or some other catastrophic event that could make them all extinct. Despite the imminent disaster, they manage to find a way through their terrible challenges and expand their family in the process. The movies are meant to be light-hearted and fun family films, so it makes sense that they follow a fairly repetitive template, but it still feels as though more could have been done to differentiate each entry and make them stand out as being different from each other.

The franchise spawned yet another spinoff of its most well-known mascot:

Related Every Actor Who Had Back-To-Back $1 Billion Movies (In Different Franchises) While billion-dollar movies are becoming increasingly regular in Hollywood, the actors who manage to star in successive entries are very few.

1 Scary Movie

Franchise length: 5 movies

Scary Movie Director Keenen Ivory Wayans Release Date July 7, 2000 Cast Regina Hall , Marlon Wayans , Anna Faris , Jon Abrahams , Shannon Elizabeth , Shawn Wayans Runtime 88 minutes

While the films tend to shift the core premise (...) the series continued to play on the same tropes.

Scary Movie is a parody of the horror genre, with more emphasis on comedy as it pokes holes in what traditional horror movies do and the tropes that plague the genre. In total, there were five Scary Movie's released between 2000 and 2013, with each one drawing heavy inspiration from popular horror films and providing a witty commentary on the genre as a whole. The series was developed by the Wayans family, who participated in many different areas of the production of the first two entries.

The series is a clear spoof of horror that features homages, tributes, and riffs on popular movies and scenes, from the names of its characters to settings, and dialogue in the films. While the films tend to shift the core premise, incorporating elements of new and popular horror movies, the series continued to play on the same tropes, using the same corny jokes, and attempting to expand juvenile or crass humor to make it into something more impactful. However, the movies failed to break any new ground, but they did inspire more spoof movie franchises.