While talking to... I think Psychotic, I noticed a funny coincidence with a couple of superhero movie franchises when it comes to their third installment.
The number three stinks.
For starters, Richard Donner's Superman and Superman II were considered to be great films and then Superman III was where it all went down the toilet and ultimately led us to Superman IV.
Tim Burton's Batman and Batman Returns were critically successful and then we got Batman Forever which is where people note the movie franchise took a turn for the worse once again leaving us to the fourth installment which shall live forever in infamy.
Sam Rami's Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 were also very successful leading us to Spider-Man 3 which was considered god awful and eventually caused an entire reboot to happen.
While hardcore X-Men comic book fans would probably tell you all the movies were crap, after you look past the changes the first two X-Men movies weren't all that bad. But it was X-Men: The Last Stand which is considered the worst and being followed up by the Wolverine spin-off didn't help.
Even The Dark Knight Rises suffers from, "Not as good as the first two" when it's brought up in conversation and now Iron Man 3 seems to be suffering from the curse of the number three with the general fan reaction to that movie. Why is that?
Well, in the case of Superman they tried to turn it into a comedy and that went about as well as you'd expect. With Batman they changed directors and wanted a more family friendly approach to the movie series after Batman Returns. Spider-Man suffered from trying to please too many people at once: Sam Rami wanted Sandman, the studio pushed for Venom and fans wanted to see Harry take over the mantle of the Green Goblin so it suffered for it.
X-Men also had a change of director by the time the third one came around and I think TDKR suffers from the insane expectations that it can never meet because of the first two films. Iron Man 3 was basically trying to be The Dark Knight Rises. It was when these films steered away from what worked or just had a change thrown on them or too much stuff going on or not being able to live up to expectations that caused things to go phew.
What's the point of this thread? I don't know. I just wanted a fun superhero movie thread so talk about superhero movies, the number 3 and funny coincidences you may have found.