The Riddick trilogy has one thing no other sci-fi franchise can match

polygon.com:

With all three live-action Riddick movies now on Netflix, and Riddick 4 currently in the works, there’s no better time to talk about Vin Diesel’s other major franchise.

In the early 2000s, few actors were being groomed for franchise superstardom the way Vin Diesel was. Within three years, he played the lead in three would-be series-launchers: the mysterious, brutal Richard B. Riddick in the sci-fi/horror film Pitch Black; the musclebound everyman Dominic Toretto in The Fast and the Furious; and as the nü-metal-infused James Bond archetype Xander Cage in XXX. All three movies experienced various degrees of success, with XXX making big money but falling apart by the sequel, and Fast and the Furiousbecoming one of the highest-grossing series of all time.

Pitch Black’s success, on the other hand, led to two sequels of varying quality and genre, with a fourth Riddick movie now in development. (Plus a little-loved animated interlude from Aeon Flux director Peter Chung: 2004’s Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury.) But the Riddick series is by far the most interesting of Diesel’s franchises. In fact, its approach to storytelling is still a refreshing outlier among most franchise narratives, even if the whole thing is, at best, deeply inconsistent. The three films’ arrival on Netflix provides a prime opportunity to look back at a trilogy that has an experimental energy no other sci-fi franchise can match. Driven by the passion of its leading man and its director, the series is admirably unpredictable in an industry usually driven by numbing regularity.

The late ’90s and early ’00s were ripe for sci-fi cinema: The Matrix, Equilibrium, and even mega-budget fare like Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace and Spider-Man