While sequels and spin-offs can be a great way for studios to ensure themselves moneymaking tentpoles for lucrative summer releases, the longer a franchise goes on, the worse it usually gets. Movie franchises are a lot like TV series; if they’re successful, they usually end up going on for too long, so it’s up to the creators to decide when it’s time to end the story.

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Very few movie franchises have ended on a high note, because Hollywood is often taken by the allure of all the money promised by more sequels. But the handful of franchises that managed to end perfectly stand out amongst the crowd.

Ended Perfectly: High School Musical

High School Musical 3

Unless High School Musical: The Musical: The Series counts as a continuation of the franchise, the High School Musical series ended in 2008 with High School Musical 3: Senior Year. The previous two movies had been made-for-TV films that aired on the Disney Channel, but they were so popular that the Mouse House released the third movie in theaters.

With a bigger budget (and a bigger screen), the makers of the High School Musical movies were able to make the musical numbers in Senior Year bolder and more cinematic than their predecessors, and it satisfied fans as a conclusion to the stories of Troy, Gabriella, Chad, Sharpay, et al.

Should’ve Ended Sooner: Indiana Jones

Indy looking down with a smile in in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Steven Spielberg said for years that the Indiana Jones series was over and there wouldn’t be a fourth movie after Last Crusade, which ended with the heroes literally riding off into the sunset. But lo and behold, years later, he dragged an aging Harrison Ford out of the cockpit of his plane, put a dusty old fedora on him, and made Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

From a nuked fridge to alien bad guys to CGI monkeys befriending Shia Labeouf in the jungle, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a pretty terrible movie. And now, an even older Harrison Ford is starring in a fifth movie that isn’t being directed by Spielberg, so there’s little hope that the new installment will magically redeem the franchise.

Ended Perfectly: Before Trilogy

Celine and Jesse walk through a Greek village in Before Midnight

It’s not easy to make three movies about the same two characters walking and talking as compelling as Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight, but Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, and Richard Linklater managed to turn that simple premise into a rare perfect trilogy.

Hawke and Linklater have both mentioned a fourth Before movie as a possibility (going by the franchise’s nine-years-at-a-time timeline, that would need to hit theaters in 2022), and if they do make a fourth movie, they’ll probably knock it out of the park as they did with the previous three. But if they never return to Jesse and Celine, Before Midnight provided a superb ending to their story.

Should’ve Ended Sooner: Men In Black

Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth in Men in Black International

After the failure of Men in Black: International, it should be abundantly clear to Sony that it’s time for the Men in Black franchise to die. Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson had proven buddy chemistry from Thor: Ragnarok and they still couldn’t make the heavily reshot, barely coherent reboot watchable.

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This is pretty definitive proof that what made the Men in Black franchise work so well was not the premise of government agents investigating aliens, but specifically Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones investigating aliens. Without them, don’t bother.

Ended Perfectly: Wolverine’s Solo Series

Hugh Jackman in Logan

Hugh Jackman initially pushed for a Wolverine solo movie because he wanted to dig deeper into the character outside of the ensemble team-up formula of the X-Men franchise. However, Fox turned X-Men Origins: Wolverine into yet another team movie, missing the point. James Mangold’s The Wolverine was a much more satisfying entry, but there was still something missing.

When Jackman decided to hang up the claws and Deadpool was a huge hit, Fox allowed Mangold to make Wolverine’s final on-screen outing an R-rated bloodbath filled with western motifs and social commentary. Although it was a pretty weak trilogy from the beginning, Wolverine’s solo series came to a pitch-perfect conclusion in Logan. The movie deconstructs the superhero myth while riffing on Shane to give Wolverine an appropriate swansong.

Should’ve Ended Sooner: Fast & Furious

Vin Diesel in Fast and Furious

Vin Diesel has confirmed that the Fast & Furious franchise — now rebranded as The Fast Saga to differentiate the mainline series from Hobbs & Shaw-esque spin-offs — will be coming to a close in three movies’ time. The ninth and tenth movies were shot back-to-back and will be ready for release when movie theaters are open again, and the eleventh will conclude the story.

While the idea of a big action-packed finale for the Fast & Furious franchise does sound tantalizing, this story already had a perfect ending with Furious 7’s touching tribute to Paul Walker. The subsequent Fast movies have been made in Walker’s honor, but he’s 50% of what made the movies so fun and without him, it’s just not the same.

Ended Perfectly: Dollars Trilogy

Clint Eastwood in The Good the Bad and the Ugly

Sergio Leone pretty much defined the spaghetti western with his groundbreaking Dollars trilogy, three violent masterpieces loosely connected by Clint Eastwood’s gruff, career-defining Man with No Name character. A Fistful of Dollars brought the plot of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo to a brutal West and For a Few Dollars More paired Blondie up with a rival bounty hunter.

But the Dollars trilogy’s crowning achievement is its final chapter, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, possibly the greatest western ever made.

Should’ve Ended Sooner: Terminator

Linda Hamilton fires a bazooka in Terminator: Dark Fate.

James Cameron is one of the best sequel-ers out there, having helmed two of the greatest sequels of all time: Aliens, a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a sequel to his own The Terminator. What makes T2 such a great sequel is that it raises the stakes from the first one — with Sarah’s son being at risk and the old Terminator model protecting them from a new Terminator model — and provides a more conclusive ending to the threat of Skynet. The budget was 15 times bigger than the original’s, and Cameron used that money to make the action 15 times bigger.

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Since T2 ended the story perfectly, three of its four sequels have emulated T2’s formula with one or two minor changes for the worse (one, to its credit, tried to do something new with a future-set war movie). Even Cameron himself couldn’t make a satisfying follow-up to T2, despite producing Terminator: Dark Fate as a new timeline-erasing Terminator 3.

Ended Perfectly: Harry Potter

Harry fights Voldemort at the Battle of Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Warner Bros. has recently revived the Harry Potter universe with the Fantastic Beasts series (although waning public approval of J.K. Rowling could threaten the franchise), but the studio hasn’t yet reteamed Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson for a ninth Potter movie — and they shouldn’t.

Rowling continued Harry’s story on the stage with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and it divided the fanbase on Last Jedi proportions. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 was already a massively satisfying finale. Leave it be.

Should’ve Ended Sooner: The Star Wars Saga

Rey vs Kylo Ren in The Rise of Skywalker

Disney is finally starting to get Star Wars right, with The Mandalorian proving that spin-offs exploring the uncharted reaches of the galaxy are the way forward, but only after the Mouse House totally bungled the sequel trilogy. There’s a faction of fans out there who unironically enjoy these movies, as well as a toxic band of diehard fans who hate them so much that they still regularly threaten the people who made them on social media.

But in between these vocal minorities are millions of semi-casual Star Wars fans who grew up with some variation of Lucas’ original movies, got very excited that a new trilogy was being released, and were bitterly disappointed by a barrage of setups that would never be paid off and derivative plot points repackaged with blatant inconsistencies. The trilogy constantly contradicted itself because there was no roadmap from the beginning.

When the sequel trilogy came to a close in The Rise of Skywalker, Disney touted it as the epic finale of the entire Star Wars saga — the Endgame of Star Wars — as a marketing tactic. By then, it had already been painfully clear for years that Return of the Jedi’s much more satisfying and cathartic (and consistent) ending should’ve remained the definitive conclusion of the Skywalkers’ story.

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