Yesterday’s Star Wars ranking showed a clear trend: as time went on, the average quality of new entries nosedived. Even Return of the Jedi, the third movie1, isn’t quite as good or original as the first two, despite generally being passable. The only exception to this trend is Revenge of the Sith, which works so well because it contains most of the plot ideas Lucas originally had for the prequels so he didn’t have to come up with as much padding2.
This is part of a wider phenomenon where media franchises generally get increasingly worse as more material is made. This includes everything from movies and TV shows to books, games, and beyond, but is most notable in cinema. There are exceptions, but their rarity is itself part of the pattern: The Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2, Aliens, The Dark Knight (within Nolan’s trilogy), you might be able to think of a few others. What’s salient about these examples is that they are all the second movie in their respective franchises, so even if there is a chance that a sequel will be better the next movie is even less likely to be better than the original.
Why does this occur? Several hypotheses can be ventured. First, you can think of individual instances of media as a roll of the dice where any one has a chance to be good. The good ones get sequels while the bad ones don’t, but the sequels go back to the base rate chance of being good and therefore are less likely to be good than the original. No one greenlights Citizen Kane 2, so the comparison set for sequels is everything-that-got-a-sequel-because-the-original-made-money, not everything-that-got-made. This is obviously a simplification of the complex process behind writing, shooting, and editing (minus the shooting for books, design for games, etc.), but it seems intuitive that great media is like “lightning in a bottle” and it is rare to make something very good that many people like and even more difficult to do so with any likelihood above some base rate. Other potential reasons include audiences getting tired of the same universe and characters, less time spent planning sequels than was spent by the creators of the original work, more of a profit motive, corporatization, and many more.
A lot of the discussion on this subject is anecdotal and vibes-based, so I am interested in how much the data empirically holds up the notion of ratings getting worse as franchises continue. I am also curious whether the trends are different for books or TV shows, at the very least with respect to the rate at which quality drops off. In the future I’ll see if Letterboxd/IMDb data actually shows the decline, or if it’s selection bias in my own memory.