Movie Franchise Finales That Totally Sucked
There's nothing quite as bad as when a series drives its name into the mud by releasing a final chapter that completely sucks. Maybe the franchise in question had been going downhill for a while, or maybe it was always awful. Either way, the final chapters of these series were absolutely abysmal and sullied whatever positive reputations their respective franchises might've had beforehand. With that in mind, reader, be warned: You're about to be exposed to some of the worst final chapters in cinematic history. Bring some popcorn as we explore ten series finale movies that absolutely, positively, unquestioningly sucked.
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
As is the case with a lot of horror franchises, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare represents another respectable horror name being dragged through the dirt for a low-quality cash-grab finale. The only real merit this film holds is in its sole interesting thematic question: How does a town's community react when their kids have been getting killed by a dream monster for five consecutive movies?
Unfortunately, the somewhat intriguing inquiry is abandoned by the movie very early on, resulting in a Nightmare movie that takes Freddy and his usual assortment of generic prey on a predictable journey that's even more rote and unengaging than the cavalcade of bad sequels that preceded this one. If a franchise can artistically suffer from diminishing returns, then Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare marks the point where they were no longer breaking even.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday
While Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday makes an admirable attempt to shake up the worn-down Friday the 13th formula, the resulting flick is one that barely features Jason (as we know him), sports absolutely laughable plot beats, and is overall a fright-devoid, unexciting dud of historic proportions.
To elaborate on that penultimate point about plot beats, also known as the real ship-sinkers of this film, let's examine the story of The Final Friday: Toward the beginning of the film, Jason is murdered. He only lives on because some coroner inexplicably decides to eat his heart and thereby get taken over by Jason's soul. Jason then gets to kill his sister (who's never been mentioned before in the series) in order to be reincarnated, and we later find out that he can only be truly killed by a magical dagger. The plot is so absurdly silly that any semblance of real tension is muffled out of existence within this mess of a motion picture.
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
In a film series that seems to take pride in spitting on its source material, the sixth Resident Evil-less Resident Evil film purports to be the end of the line for the most disrespectful adaptation to date. As far as that claim goes, we can only hope the studios mean what they say by the title The Final Chapter.
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter drops the ball on nearly every front. For starters, it completely forgets to fulfill its narrative obligations from the previous movie, leaving the stories of Leon S. Kennedy, Ada Wong, and Jill Valentine unfinished. These glaring omissions are made even more egregious by the story that is present, the likes of which is entirely devoid of originality or intrigue. Beyond that, audiences also have to suffer through RE:TFC's near-endless gauntlet of overblown CGI fight scenes, their tedious and pointless nature serving as just one more strike against the film. And, in case those two massive red flags didn't sink the movie by themselves, the film's headache-inducing editing style makes sure to sully whatever shreds of a good film might've remained. In short, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is an absolute mess — it ignores what few remaining (and life-saving) ties it had to its source material and doubles down on the same cinematic schlock it's been losing critics over since the very first movie.
Saw: The Final Chapter
While the original Saw was a movie with some genuine novelty and scare to it, Saw VII, otherwise known as Saw 3D or Saw: The Final Chapter, is a complete tarnishing of the series' once proud name. It retreads the same old deathtrap gimmicks, this time taking the violence to such meaningless excesses that everything within the film ceases to matter. Saw: The Final Chapter goes so over the top with its by-the-numbers executions that it's ultimately nothing more than a montage of gooey, red special effects being squirted onto a screen for an hour and forty minutes. Whereas the original movie smartly restrained itself in order to induce genuine frights, The Final Chapter force-feeds viewers an exhausting conga line of predictable gross-out scenes until the monotony is almost unbearable. In that sense, the movie itself might just have been Jigsaw's true final trap.
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
This is one of those final chapters where, had it truly been the final chapter, the series would've ended in disgrace. Therefore, there's cause to be somewhat grateful that more F13 movies came out after this one and equal cause to be infuriated that this movie had the gall to pass itself off as a franchise finisher in the first place.
The mistakes with Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter are many. First of all, Jason doesn't even show up until an hour into the film. This means the audience is forced to endure an entire hour devoted to "developing" (we're being generous) the cannon fodder just so that there's an ounce of emotional impact when Jason goes to town on them. This overly long attempt at character building is both pointless and ineffective, especially for a hack-'n'-slash horror film. That narrative fumble could be forgiven, however, if Jason's arrival acted as a turning point for the film. Unfortunately, it doesn't. Although Jason gets to killing right away, most of the violence is surprisingly reserved and mess-free, to such a degree that it's not even morbidly entertaining. Given that was the only shot this movie had at redeeming itself, we think it's pretty safe to say that Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter totally sucked.
Final Destination 4: The Final Destination
Final Destination 4 is exactly what it's advertised as, an uninventive cash-grab of a sequel that features a derivative plot built to kill some disposable actors in excessively gory ways. Given that backdrop, you'd think the C-tier cast, painfully generically written characters, and general hollowness of the plot would all be forgivable thanks to the cathartic violence — yet, somehow, FD4 even manages to mess that up.
Without exception, every single one of the deaths in this movie is overdone, poorly animated CGI nonsense. Blood consistently looks like ketchup, bodies ragdoll without impact, and the final death scene isn't even original, it's a shameless rip-off of Mortal Kombat's x-ray attacks. While Final Destination 4's predecessors at least understood the value of creative killing, this film remains a new nadir for Hollywood schlock-horror.
Twilight: Breaking Dawn — Part 2
While it might just be the best of the Twilight movies, Breaking Dawn — Part 2 doesn't exactly flip the script on the notion that all of the series' films, final chapter included, suck. Even though Breaking Dawn — Part 2 features a kind of, sort of engaging fight scene that manages to single-handedly elevate the film above the others in the franchise, that one sequence isn't enough to save it from general badness.
Just as one might expect, this film continues the series' trend of cringe-inducing, tween-targeted dialogue, toothless romantic interactions between a sparkly vampire and an actress who refuses to show emotion, and a general pulpiness that transcends the "so bad it's good" category. Therefore, Breaking Dawn — Part 2 is most definitely a final chapter that totally sucked.
The Matrix Revolutions
The Matrix Revolutions is the quintessential bad sci-fi finale. It sports a ludicrous narrative stuffed with deus ex machinas (that's even a character's name, for crying out loud) and a penchant for dunking on all of the things that made the original movie great. There's nothing subversive or conceptually mind-blowing about Revolutions, unlike the first Matrix flick. Instead, the third movie opts to pile on exorbitant amounts of CGI to mask its shallowness, only ever tiptoeing near its predecessors' highbrow sci-fi concepts in order to move the plot forward. Worse yet, when it does choose to delve into intellectual content, it does so by ruining the ambiguity and mystery that made the first film's plot so intriguing. In other words, barring a very cool final fight between Neo and antagonist Smith, Revolutions was a train wreck of a finale to one of the best sci-fi series of all time.
The Hangover Part III
Despite the movie title's tongue-in-cheek nature, it's hard to fathom going in sober to this installment of the Hangover franchise, given how rough it is. Part III takes Zach Galifianakis' character and ruins him, taking the once ironically funny third musketeer and turning downright pathetic solely for cheap laughs. And while this trilogy capper at least tried to be original with its setup and premise (unlike The Hangover II which copy+pasted the first film's logline), the plot eventually resorts to predictable beats of "shock value" to carry its narrative. Seriously, if a movie needs to decapitate an innocent giraffe (yes, we know it's CGI) for "humor," then it's clear the writers ran out of good material a looong time earlier.
Fifty Shades Freed
You knew this one was coming, reader: Fifty Shades Freed earns our coveted final slot on the "suckiest final chapters" list! What makes Freed such a worthy winner of this prestigious title, you ask? Is it the movie's narratively nonsensical entanglement of butt plugs and hostage situations? Could it be the offensively bland sex scenes that this series built its reputation on? Perhaps it's the hollow performances from two romantic leads with zero chemistry? Maybe, just maybe, it's all of the above.
Unlike Dakota Johnson, it turns out our tolerance for bad movies just isn't that high.