10 Best Movie Franchises That Started In The 1980s

10 Best Movie Franchises That Started In The 1980s

From Indiana Jones to Die Hard to Back to the Future, some of the most beloved movie franchises of all time started in the 1980s.

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With a new Marvel, DC, or Star Wars movie releasing every couple of months, it’s easy to see why audiences complain about franchises taking over the film industry. But franchises have been a huge part of the cinematic landscape for decades. In the 1960s, audiences were inundated with James Bond and Planet of the Apes sequels.

After the success of high-concept gems Jaws and Star Wars in the 1970s, the 1980s saw the rise of franchises revolving around characters like Indiana Jones, John McClane, Marty McFly, Sarah Connor, and Batman.

10 Rambo

Sylvester Stallone made his own acting career in the 1970s by writing the title role in Rocky for himself and launching a lucrative boxing movie franchise. In the ‘80s, Stallone secured a second blockbuster franchise with the even more action-packed Rambo series.

The original movie, First Blood, is a small-scale meditation on the treatment of Vietnam War veterans in which John Rambo desperately avoids directly taking any human lives. The sequels all took a different approach, turning Rambo into a remorseless killing machine, but it made for some spectacular action sequences.

9 Friday The 13th

After John Carpenter’s seminal 1978 masterpiece Halloween laid out an easy-to-follow blueprint for low-budget horror filmmakers, Friday the 13th was one of the first movies to cash in on the subsequent slasher trend of the ‘80s.

While the first movie reveals Jason’s vengeful mother Pamela to be the villain, a zombified Jason Voorhees went on to become the big bad of the ensuing carefully branded franchise.

8 Police Story

Since he’s actually in front of the camera doing the stunt work, take after take, Jackie Chan is one of the greatest action filmmakers in the world. One of his finest directorial efforts is Police Story, an action-packed noir that launched a lucrative franchise.

Chan has since starred in three Police Story sequels – including the critically acclaimed Super Cop – as well as two franchise reboots.

7 Ghostbusters

Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis’ wacky script, Ivan Reitman’s grounded approach, and Bill Murray’s iconic ad-libs combined to make Ghostbusters a timeless comedy hit.

Since the classic original, the Ghostbusters franchise has stumbled through a disappointing sequel and a lackluster reboot. Jason Reitman’s fourth installment, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, finally found the sweet spot between carving out a new niche and honoring the series’ legacy.

6 Back To The Future

Robert Zemeckis’ time-travel comedy Back to the Future is a near-perfect movie that could’ve stood alone without any sequels. But it ends on a “To be continued…” cliffhanger, so Zemeckis was always planning to continue the story.

Thanks to positive word-of-mouth, Back to the Future became one of the biggest box office hits of 1985. Universal greenlit back-to-back sequels, allowing Zemeckis to complete the trilogy with a wildly speculative vision of the future, a dystopian alternate present, and a trip to the Old West.

5 Terminator

James Cameron’s The Terminator takes a grounded neo-noir approach to the story of a time-traveling post-apocalyptic warrior protecting a waitress from the killer cyborg sent from the future to assassinate her. Terminator 2: Judgment Day, one of the most acclaimed sequels of all time, significantly raised the stakes and scale of the Terminator saga with explosive action and groundbreaking VFX.

After T2, the only Terminator sequel helmed by Cameron himself, the quality of the franchise went drastically downhill. Every Terminator movie since then has been panned by critics.

4 A Nightmare On Elm Street

The slasher genre had become pretty well-worn after six years of Halloween rip-offs, but Wes Craven’s 1984 hit A Nightmare on Elm Street managed to put a fresh spin on it with a paranormal twist. Instead of being a straightforward masked killer like Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger haunts teenagers’ dreams – he’s the ultimate boogeyman.

After Craven’s cliffhanger ending left Freddy’s fate open-ended, an incessant slew of sequels ended up doing the character to death (so to speak). The Nightmare franchise is overdue for its own Halloween-style reboot making Freddy scary again.

3 Batman

Technically, Batman had graced the big screen before Tim Burton’s 1989 movie hit theaters, but Burton’s Batman films launched the dark, gothic, visually stunning blockbuster franchise as fans know it today. After Batman Returns, Burton relinquished the series to other filmmakers (and Michael Keaton relinquished the role of Batman to other actors).

The torch of the Batman movie franchise has since been carried by a handful of filmmakers to varying degrees of success. Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin is panned as one of the worst movies ever made, while Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is praised as one of the greatest.

2 Die Hard

After actors like Stallone and Schwarzenegger dominated ‘80s action cinema with their rippling muscles and invincible characters, Bruce Willis’ relatable everyman John McClane was a breath of fresh air in 1988’s Die Hard.

While the most recent sequel, A Good Day to Die Hard, was a huge disappointment, all the preceding sequels were surprisingly satisfactory: the second movie got self-aware in an airport, the third one teamed up McClane with a wisecracking Samuel L. Jackson, and the fourth movie brought McClane into the modern big-budget blockbuster age while retaining his gruff, cynical edge.

1 Indiana Jones

After creating a global cinematic phenomenon with a throwback to one pulp genre, George Lucas went and did it again – and with the same lead actor. Lucas followed up Star Wars, his homage to old sci-fi serials like Flash Gordon, with Raiders of the Lost Ark, his and Steven Spielberg’s homage to old adventure serials like Doc Savage.

With the Indiana Jones series, Spielberg hoped to give American action cinema its own answer to James Bond. With globetrotting adventures, old-school action sequences, and an unforgettable icon, it’s safe to say he managed to reach those lofty ambitions.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/best-1980s-movie-franchises/

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