It’s extremely rare in today’s intellectual property-dominated film market to see an original film spawn a long-running franchise. Of course, these films are not always fully original. But while they tend to derive from narrative formulas that have worked in the past, at least they are written from scratch without the significant help of a novel, a comic, a video game or, nowadays, the origin story of a popular brand. .
So, kudos to Gregory Widen and Paul Maslansky for possessing the creative chutzpah to launch two very successful franchises, “Highlander” and “Police Academy,” respectively. The former gave fans four installments over a 14-year span, while the latter rattled off six entries once a year between 1984 and 1989 (and a seventh evening with much of the same cast in 1994).
“Police Academy” was especially zeitgeisty, trafficking in the outlandish parody jokes made popular by the ZAZ team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (“Airplane!”) without being a parody itself. The films were basically raunchy variations on Mack Sennett’s silent comedies Keystone Cops, and for some reason they connected emphatically with moviegoers. The most important thing for Warner Bros., which released all seven films, was that they were made cheaply and made a lot of money at the box office. The first film cost a total of $4.8 million and grossed $149.8 million worldwide. The entire film series grossed a total of $537.8 million worldwide, but as individual grosses declined and budgets increased, WB lost its appetite for the team’s calcifying Law & Order antics. .
“Highlander,” starring Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery as immortal warriors, was a different commercial affair in that, with a worldwide gross of $12.8 million on a $19 million budget, it lost money in theaters. . The sequels also performed poorly at the box office. However, they were very popular on video and cable, and spawned a television series, an anime film, novels, and comics.
So what could be “unfortunate” about two movie series that made their creators a lot of cash?
