The Five Best (and Five Worst) Ways to Handle a Fourth Film in a Franchise

One of the fundamentals of the movie business is the three-act structure as the foundation of storytelling, which more or less means that every movie must have a beginning, middle and end. The beginning sets the main character off on his or her task, the middle piles on more challenges, and the end features a reckoning that usually ends with the protagonist triumphant. The most obvious execution of this idea can be seen in each of the original three Star Wars movies, as Luke Skywalker spends each act on a different planet: Tatooine/DeathStar/Yavin 4 airspace, Hoth/Dagobah/Bespin, Tatooine/Endor/Death Star.

In a micro sense we’re taught in film school that each act can itself be broken into three acts, as can each individual scene; in the macro sense, one of the reasons we’re so obsessed with trilogies for cinematic properties is because they function as three-act structure writ large. Which is why, when a fourth film gets greenlit, things are thrown for a loop. Do you start a new trilogy? Are there any loose ends left to tie up? Where do we go following the neat closure that our three-act trilogy presumably left us with?

These have to be the questions on Steven Spielberg’s mind as he preps Jurassic Park 4. And based on prior big-screen tales that made it to the quadrilogy stage, we can certainly get a sense of what approaches do and don’t work.

Let us start with what not to do.

5. Find ways to keep the most popular actor around even if they make no sense (Saw IV, Alien Resurrection).

Once you’ve killed off a character, honor that decision. Suddenly revealing that he actually did a shit-ton more things in his last month of life than anyone with cancer could possibly do feels (and is) desperate. Tobin Bell was the best thing about the Saw series, so I understand the choice – but he was never meant to last beyond three movies, and nor was Ripley beyond Alien 3.

Michael Crichton already ignored this rule in his books by bringing back Ian Malcolm for The Lost World; since Malcolm never died in the movies, the only popular people worth resurrecting would be Samuel L. Jackson and Wayne Knight’s characters from the first film. Hey, at least cloning is already established as a plot point.

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