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Notes -
It takes a lot of skill to create tension, in general.
T1 there was the whole "this is an implacable, nigh-invulnerable killing machine that is programmed to kill YOU, specifically. And your only defense is a squishy standard human."
T2 had that, PLUS the target was a child, who now had to befriend his own implacable, nigh-invulnerable killing machine.
Repeating the formula starts to break that tension, even if you ostensibly escalate with a bigger, badder robot. Harder to manipulate audience expectations.
Similar with Predator. You can keep iterating "now they're in the 1700s. Now they're in Japan. Now its an alien planet and there's 10 preds." But how do you get audiences to buy in a third, fourth, fifth time?
And the Alien series. "Oh man one of these things was terrifying. How about HUNDREDS of them?"
Where to do you go from there without being derivative?
I think this has also hurt the John Wick films. By the third, we know he's going to be pull his suit up to cover his head and will never take a serious wound during an action sequence.
By 4 he's surviving MULTIPLE 30 foot drops.
Its still great action, I still like the films, but the appeal in the first was that he did seem vulnerable.
Its should, I think, sometimes be easy to say that you can capture "lightning in a bottle" only 2-3 times and unless you're a generational talent at filmmaking, things will inherently get formulaic if you keep trying to recreate that success.
Alien Resurrection showed one possible way to do that. Unfortunately the movie fucked up in so many other ways, probably not helped by the setup from (equally fucked up if in other ways) Alien 3.
I think it's a mistake to think that you necessarily have to escalate. There are many other ways to add a twist. Sure, Aliens added a whole lot more aliens but it also transformed the movie into a different genre and made Ripley into one of the most badass female film characters of all time (an excellent example of how to show an actually badass female character instead of telling someone is supposed to be one).
I agree.
Some of my favorite series of all time basically just advance the plot in interesting directions, let the characters have meaningful development, and then, (key point) put those characters in situations that actually, believably challenge them.
The Bourne Trilogy (I generally don't acknowledge anything that came after) was incredibly tight on scripting, never let the scope grow too big. Add likeable characters here and there, and then ratchet up the tension on them.
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Zvi Mowshowitz had a post about the legal systems of John Wick in which he says that the "legal"/political background of the films (and therefore the types of story that get told) is what changes from episode to episode. [Basically, from an "honorable" criminal organisation where the morality is Lawful Evil, the Continental Hotel is sacrosanct, and markers are honoured, to outlaw life as opponents of a lawless shadowy conspiracy which controls the High Table and includes the man who finds Wick in the desert, to something vaguely reminiscent of feudalism by the fourth film].
The situation seemed to have changed from the Cops being aware that the assassin underworld exists and willingly staying hands off (Jimmy the cop asking John if he's working again), to one where the Cops are functionally powerless since the assassins operate an international network with friends in high places.
Then the "High Table" seems to be some absurdly powerful entity that still operates outside the law, but its not clear exactly how powerful (dropping whole busses full of armored spec ops at the Continental is a clue), to, yeah, seemingly being a world power of some kind.
My 'headcanon' as far as that goes is that national governments accept their existence and use them as a nonmilitary method of intervention and conflict resolution, and this is what sustains the overall assassin economy (which otherwise barely makes any sense), as long as the High Table can keep collateral damage to a minimum.
Hence why John repeatedly going ham at dance parties/nightclubs becomes a real problem.
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'80s horror series (including, interestingly, the ones that rip off that style like Stranger Things) also all suffer from this.
Ironically, the series that avoids this is, of all things, FNAF, to the point it blew up into an entire ecosystem. But FNAF is a game- a simple one, at that- that relies on abusing a fundamental quirk of human biology [re: a thing that screams at you and gets all up in your face when you lose] as the main tension driver (and everything else is pseudo-ARG for people who actually want to engage with it).
Episodics tend to avoid this, but they have different problems, which leads to the Half-Life 2/3 problem.
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Hilariously, Predator was created in the first place due to this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_and_John_Thomas
lol.
Sort of makes the point, though, doesn't it?
If you have an actually interesting idea for an existing franchise... maybe its better for everyone if you mold it into its own thing, first, so it doesn't carry baggage from said existing franchise that might weigh it down.
Me, I don't know how to tell when its sensible to take a new idea on an existing series and add it to the canon, vs. create a new, wholly unrelated work so it stands on its own.
I just know that more series than not end up wearing out their welcome when they go that route.
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