Ready for Your Favorite Movie Part IV?

After a summer of slumping box office returns, disappointing reboots, and weak adaptations, several studios are falling back on one of the tried and true ways of sustaining a franchise: more sequels. In the past, it was the height of folly to make more than two sequels to any hit film unless you were churning out cheap horror flicks starring Freddy and Jason. Occasionally you had a Dirty Harry or a Captain Kirk who could get away with it, but poor Rocky Balboa couldn't. Pushing past "Part III" would sometimes pay off financially, but was almost always viewed as a blatant cash-grab or a sign of creative bankruptcy. Sometimes, the audience response was so dire to fourth installments, it ruined the reputations of whole franchises. Superman was burned in the 80s by "Quest for Peace," and Batman was a laughingstock in the 90s after "Batman and Robin."

And yet here we are, on the verge of a new year at the movies that will be filled with more sequels than ever, many of them on their fourth, fifth, or eighth installments. There are a few prequels and reboots to add some variation, but by and large it's a glut of traditional sequels that are going to be storming the screens. Just looking at fourth acts, 2011 will bring us "Scream 4," "Spy Kids 4" "Mission Impossible IV," "Twilight: Breaking Dawn," and "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides." The dangers of franchise fatigue are still alive and well, as many properties like "Spider-Man" and "X-Men" are going the reboot route after being brought low by disastrous sequels, but for the most part it seems that the old stigma against the once-dreaded "Part IV" has disappeared. How did this happen? What changed?

We need to go back to the beginning and suss out why filmmakers were expected to stop after the completion of a trilogy in the first place. When you look back over the history of film, there were plenty of properties that spawned more than two sequels. "The Gold Diggers of 1933" had four sequels and "The Thin Man" had five. During the 30s and 40s, Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan headlined film series with at least a dozen entries each, even if you only count the ones that had the same actors in the title roles. After the advent of television, the demand for multi-part adventure serials and the more mundane film series like "Blondie" and "Dr. Kildare" died away, but you still saw the emergence of properties like "The Pink Panther" and "The Three Stooges" that would come around every year or two. James Bond, one of the greatest perennials in movie history, has racked up twenty-two films and is still going strong.

The emergence of the trilogy as the standard length for a film series by the 80s came from the combination of a lot of different factors, but it really boiled down to successive sequels becoming associated with drops in quality and drops in box office numbers. Studios became more risk averse as film productions became more expensive. That's why, when a second or third sequel was badly received, the studios were quicker to pull the plug on franchises. Directors also had an easier time sustaining quality over three films rather than four or five, often modeling their narratives after the traditional structure of a three-act play, so the trilogy really became a storytelling unit in and of itself. More highbrow auteurs like Satyajit Ray and Michaelangelo Antonioni were associated with famous trilogies, and a string of massively popular blockbuster trilogies like "Star Wars," "Indiana Jones," and "Back to the Future," also helped to make three movies the default.

When you look at the proliferation of "Part IV" or higher numbered franchise films coming out now, it's because the cinema culture has changed again. Studios are more risk averse than ever, but the pendulum has swung back the other way. Having built their business around franchises and brands, and faced with the uncertainty of investing in original material, the appeal of making a fourth "Bourne" or "Ice Age" movie becomes obvious. Franchises offer a certain amount of security to studios, who are always looking for their next dependable revenue stream. But with so many would-be franchise starters like "Prince of Persia" and "The Last Airbender" bombing this year, many have opted to go back to material that has been proven to work, though they run the risk that the audience may lose interest and leave them in the lurch.

Higher numbered sequels are still associated with worse quality, but not always. Series like "Harry Potter" and "Narnia" have source material that runs longer than three installments, so it makes sense to have additional movies. In other cases, plots have become less serialized and more episodic so franchises are less dependent on specific writers or directors staying for the duration. The past few years have proved that audiences are willing to put down money for sequels that everyone acknowledges are only mediocre. The fourth "Indiana Jones," "Terminator," and "Die Hard" films all did well at the box office. The fourth "Fast and the Furious" was a surprise hit last spring, outgrossing all of the prior sequels despite lousy reviews. This year's "Shrek Forever After," however, didn't come close to the totals of "Shrek 2" or "Shrek 3" and will be the last "Shrek" film.

The age of the endless sequels appears to be upon us in full force, and isn't going away in the foreseeable future. However, cinephiles can take comfort knowing that titles appended with "Part IV" are now as likely to be expensive blockbusters as they are to be bargain-basement, straight-to-video dreck. And far from being some new, alarming development, this can easily be seen as a return to an older age when a sixth or seventh sequel wasn't such a sign of notoriety. Heck, I'm looking forward to the last "Harry Potter" movies myself. If a franchise can maintain that level quality over so many movies, then as far as I'm concerned it can go on for as long as it likes.