It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of too much free time must be in want of writing a blog. In so doing, it is necessary to establish a gimmick for said blog. Inspired by other writers intent upon watching all the films in the Criterion Collection of the IMDb Bottom 100, this blog aims to do something similar...
I am going to watch every film franchise ever made. (I am insane.)
For the sake of my sanity primarily, we must define what constitutes a film franchise lest things get overwhelming. My primary guideline is this – A franchise needs at least 4 films. That means self-contained trilogies are off the table, as are any series that didn’t have the longevity or whatever to make it to four.
Secondly, I am only counting films that have been released theatrically in their countries of origin. This means no direct-to-video, no made-for-TV, no other strange hyphenate offshoots. This rule has been created mostly to protect myself from having to watch the entire Leprechaun or Land Before Time series, and surely you will grant me that. However, Pokémon and any of the other flabbergastingly multitudinous anime franchises have been released theatrically in Japan. I still have to watch those!
There is also the question of how to consider remakes, reboots, reimaginings, spinoffs, prequels, interquels, crossovers, and any other oddball variations. There are so many weird permutations out there, and I’m afraid they’ll have to be decided on a per-series basis. This means I can decide, 25 or so Godzilla films in, if I have the stomach to endure that damned American remake. Or how King Kong fits into it all.
Despite these limitations, there are still roughly 181 film franchises I must watch, with nearly two thousand movies in total! And growing! This accounts for everything from well-known Hollywood blockbusters, to old B-movies and serial programmers from the 30s and 40s, to countless obscure foreign creations.
For the sake of the upcoming decade or so of reviews, I have arranged the franchises entirely at random, weighted by the number of films per series. Maybe later on I could list out all these franchises (trying to conserve space at the moment). For the time being, though, here is a taste of my immediate future (again, picked at random):
The Fast and the Furious (4 movies)
Ilsa (4 movies)
Karl May (23 movies)
Andy Hardy (16 movies)
Yeah, I never heard of some of those either. The Fast and the Furious?! Huh?!
This whole exercise is gonna be that way.
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