2024’s franchise blockbusters, ranked by their value to the series

polygon.com:

In Hollywood, the question “Does this movie franchise need another chapter?” seems to have a pretty easy answer: “Sure, if we think it’ll still make money!”

For fans of a given franchise, though, the calculations are more complicated. Will that new installment in a movie series actually add anything worthwhile to the story, or just undermine the franchise’s original successes? Do we actually want to know more about our favorite characters, or will prequels and spinoffs ruin them? Do we have any reason to believe the latest movie using a familiar IP has a reason to exist that isn’t entirely mercenary? Will it at least be some big dumb fun?

So far, 2024 hasn’t given us many thumbs-up answers to those questions — but a few of the year’s franchise movies have done more to earn their box-office take than the rest. So we decided to run the numbers, ranking the year’s latest-in-a-series movies by how well they justify their existence — both as movies and as installments in ongoing stories.

A remake of 2008’s home-invasion horror movie The Strangers wasn’t necessary, but it could have been good: With a premise as solid gold as “masked strangers break into a remote home and kill the couple vacationing there,” there are a million different takes that could have been great horror fodder that doesn’t follow the original movie beat for beat. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the uninspired approach director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2) takes with this movie, the first in a planned trilogy that was originally written as one massive four-hour-plus movie, until Legendary Entertainment broke it down into chunks.

This new batch of Strangers movies is meant to follow the characters in the aftermath of this initial home invasion. But it kicks off with Harlin essentially remaking the first Strangers with less style and dread. Gone is the slow creepiness of the original movie, replaced by rushed horror sequences and a few moments of lackluster action. While it’s possible that parts 2 and 3