Which franchises do we actually need?

I was out with two of the critics who write for my site last, who each write separately as well as jointly with each other, as what has historically been called "The ReelGood Christmas Party." This is actually a thing that has only happened about four of the 11 years I have been associated with the site, five at the very most, and at some point I think it happened another time of the year entirely, but was still called that. We used to record a podcast and then we would go out for many libations, but my new house is by a main road and not advantageous from a sound perspective, plus I'd have to remind myself how to work the recording technology. 

To give you some idea of the scarcity of these parties, this was our first since 2020. Yes, we did have one during the pandemic, when that might have been hard, though that summer (it's summer in Australia) we were essentially COVID-free for a blissful couple of months. And then we have not had one since, when it would have been easier. In fact, we almost cancelled this one when one of the two guys couldn't make the original date, which was next Friday. Instead of delaying it until an unspecified time early in 2025 (which would likely mean it would never happen), we pushed it forward a week and had it last night. I had the guys over for drinks and BBQ in my back yard (even though it was lightly raining) and then we went out for drinks afterward. 

I'm telling you all this because of course we talked about movies almost non-stop. In fact, it was one of those conversations where when you get to the end of it, you think of all things you might have discussed that just never came up. Always better that way than running out of things to say halfway through the evening.

And as inevitably happens, we talked about franchise fatigue, about how many intellectual properties had completely run their course, but Hollywood was too risk averse to abandon them in favor of new ideas. And believe me, I get that. New ideas often fail spectacularly, and Hollywood is not a business that can afford to fail with any regularity.

And then this question occurred to me:

"Well, we have to have some franchises. Which are the ones we actually need?"

No one had a satisfying answer to this question.

And if you are reading this piece in the hopes that I have come up with the answers in the 14 hours since this conversation occurred, many of which have been spent sleeping and severely hungover, I'm sorry to disappoint you.

One of the guys ventured that some of the horror franchises had continued to sustain interest, a theory I did not openly disagree with, though I do sort of disagree with it. But I countered that horror franchises were always going to be a different story because although they appealed to a passionate subsection of the moviegoing populace that's eager and willing to spend their money, they were never going to rake in $300 or $400 million at the box office. For that you need something that can appeal to everyone in the family.

And no one could think of an example.

We didn't linger on the topic very long. In movie conversations, there's always another fruitful tangent to be followed. 

But I've lingered on it in my mind, a bit, at least enough to write this post. I still don't really have answers, but I have a few ideas. 

What you're really looking for, here, is an intellectual property that's new enough to not have exhausted us through a half-dozen or more cinematic incarnations, but reliable enough to be an easy green light for a studio. Dune was one idea I had. We're not sick of Dune yet, and I think this version of the franchise with these characters could sustain at least two more features before we reach that point. But Dune is also a bit of an anomaly, a fundamentally sort of inaccessible text that was matched up with a director who could really enthrall us. Dune is not your everyday reliable IP.

Using recency bias, I suggested Wicked. But immediately kind of ate my own words. There will only be one more Wicked, though if it's as big of a hit as this one, I could see spinoffs like Scarecrow: From the World of Wicked. Still, in trying to produce answers to this question, we're not talking about something that is fresh and new (even if its origins go back some 30 years to the publication of the novel), we're talking about something we already knew was viable a month ago. Then again, I guess Wizard of Oz is really the franchise here, so that's been going on a lot longer. 

I have no idea if they're making a Barbie sequel -- I'd be surprised if someone wouldn't want to do it, even if that person is not Greta Gerwig. But a single sequel is almost guaranteed to be the most more we could take of the concept without really turning on it, and it's far more likely to be a creative failure than a success.

If you try to look for guidance from the biggest franchise in movie history -- Marvel, DC, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, James Bond, Jurassic Park, etc. -- it's really hard to find one that has been relatively judicious in its engagement with the cinematic landscape, enough not to wear us out by the year 2024. It doesn't mean we, especially I as a critic and a completist, won't see these movies. It just means we won't be enthusiastic about the prospect, and will grouse about them at film website Christmas parties when given the chance.

There's one franchise, though, that I specifically excluded from the list in the previous paragraph. Because we were also talking about this as a continuation of a discussion in a message thread earlier in the week, I proposed that I would really look forward to another Star Wars movie. It's been five years now, and as I sit here, I don't actually know if any of the proposed plans for future trilogies is actually going forward at this point. I know the Patty Jenkins movie was scrapped, and I think the various creative teams who had been assigned an idea -- like the Game of Thrones guys -- are also in some sort of turnaround. I suspect we'll get something before 2030, but I don't know what it will be.

And when I realized that made me sad, it also made me realize that I do, in fact, have an answer to this. We need Star Wars.

These guys are younger than I am -- one 12 years younger, one 17 -- so I had the opportunity to regale them (not for the first time) with the story about how I had seen the original Star Wars in the theater on its initial release. But instead of that just being another rehashed story, not unlike the franchises themselves -- and we had a talk about rehashed personal stories too last night, though not related to this -- it was an opportunity for me to lay the groundwork for why I will give Star Wars an unlimited number of additional chances to wow me. Any time I see a new character activating a lightsaber in a setting I've never seen before, it will stir the excitement of that child who saw the first lightsaber ever extended. 

And it's not the same to see it in a TV show. I think Disney ultimately knows this. In fact, I have only watched one episode total from the most recent two Star Wars series.

We all know that the movies are where franchises truly live, truly exceed the limitations of the small screen to exist in all their glory and grandeur.

And I don't know about the rest of you, but I need Star Wars to prop up my personal cinematic landscape.  

Buying back in to Pirates

If you're like me, you were charmed and delighted by the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, then hated the next two to varying degrees. (For the record, the second one is the worst. The third recovers slightly, but not nearly enough.)

Logically, the fourth movie in the series -- Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, releasing today -- should represent even more creative bankruptcy and a desperate grab for the remaining possible dollars the franchise can scare up.

Unless ...

Unless there's enough of a pause in the production schedule of the movies that the fourth kind of seems like a reboot, rather than just your typical fourth installment.

The second and the third, after all, were made at the same time, and they made a kajillion dollars at the box office. Given their success, you'd figure Disney would have had Johnny Depp back out on a boat within a week of the opening of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Or maybe even within a week of Dead Man's Chest's massive opening weekend.

But they didn't, content (at least for the time being) with having a trilogy on their hands. Such a quaint notion. Of course it couldn't last.

After a reasonable period (almost like after a spouse dies), you started to hear rumblings that Depp might be willing to get back out there for a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean. Then one day you're seeing trailers for it.

It's odd for me to be taking this critical perspective on the series, because really, the delay between the third and fourth Pirates wasn't much longer than industry standard. The first movie came out (and charmed our socks off) in 2003, then Gore Verbinski and his team went hard on production to churn out two sub-par sequels that were released a year apart, in 2006 and 2007. So essentially, the gap between the third and the fourth movie is only one year longer than the gap between the first and second movies. Hardly enough time for us to have forgotten about Captain Jack Sparrow et al.

But the psychological difference is enormous. The big difference in the cinematic landscape between then and now -- though you could argue about exactly when this started -- is that fewer and fewer franchises are considering it an obstacle that it's been five, ten, even 15 years since the last movie in the series. It's almost like we, as a moviegoing public, have collectively given Hollywood permission to tack on as many fourth and fifth installments to series as it wants to tack on. Whereas in the past, we might have been offended by this presumptuousness and demonstrated our ill humor by refusing to buy tickets, now it seems we just want the comfort of familiarity and brand recognition. Even when you're starting to see crooked numbers on the ends of these movie titles (though most of them, like Pirates, cleverly withhold the number from the title to help diminish your sense of the absurdity of it all). Like I said, you could argue that this has always been Hollywood's MO, but I'd counter that it has gotten all the more ridiculous in the past half decade.

So when it was clear that everyone involved in the Pirates movies went home, caught their breath, lay on a beach on the French Riviera for a few months, and then decided to make a Pirates 4, something about that seems to legitimize the process, doesn't it? Funnily enough, this is something you can argue both ways. If you're negatively disposed toward their intentions, you could say that the series was over and done, tied up with a bow, and they ripped the bow off because they just couldn't stand not to make more money on this brand. If you're positively disposed, you'd say that they were not on automatic pilot toward a fourth movie, even though the box office totals nearly demanded it, and only grudgingly did they wade back into the waters, possibly only because they had a really good script and a really good story to tell. (The truth, which I won't bother to look up right now, is probably that Depp originally said he wasn't interested and then ultimately changed his mind.)

But I think there's another reason why some skeptical fans, including myself, are keeping an open mind toward the newest Pirates. Namely, the movie seems to have trimmed some of the excess fat. In this case, the excess fat is probably the two thinnest and most beautiful people in the cast: Kiera Knightley and Orlando Bloom.

Now, I don't remember a whole lot about what happens in the last two Pirates movies -- in fact, so aimless were the events of Dead Man's Chest that I couldn't even remember what happened after I'd shut off the DVD. But I do remember feeling cumulatively fatigued about the melodramatic ups and downs of the relationship between Will Turner (Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Knightley). It was as if those characters worked for the original movie, then they couldn't figure out what to do with them for the sequels. But their presence was considered key to putting asses in the seats, so they were around, collecting new adventures and wearing our patience thin. I don't think it was the fault of the actors, mind you, who are both quite appealing. I just think there was a general narrative sense that they had overstayed their welcome.

And they're gone from Pirates 4. Again, this could be a case of both actors refusing to participate in further Pirates movies, either being happy with the bow that had been tied on the series, or as unhappy with those movies as I was, and not wanting to sully their names further by making another one. I'm again not bothering to look it up. But the landmark realization here, even if it was happened upon by accident, is that Captain Jack Sparrow is where this series' bread is buttered. Bring Sparrow back, surround him with some promisingly cast newcomers (Penelope Cruz), and return just a face or two among the minor characters (Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbossa), and you'll have the makings for a fourth Pirates. Heck, you might have the makings for a fifth and a sixth as well.

And more than anything, this movie just looks fun -- fun like the ride that inspired the series in the first place. I can't say for sure that this sense of fun was missing from the trailers of the second and third Pirates, but I feel like it probably was. The set pieces look clever and cheeky, and everyone seems to be having a damn good time.

I think I'm also interested in the controls of the ship being handed over to a new director, Rob Marshall of Chicago fame. Marshall has clearly proven his ability to make a movie that functions as spectacle, and I welcome what he might bring to this movie (and the others that seem sure to follow). I'm a huge Chicago fan, though I guess that's Marshall's only unqualified success -- Nine was only so-so, and I did not see Memoirs of a Geisha. Now, I don't really want Depp and Cruz to break out into song, but I'm not really expecting that to happen. This is not to say Verbinski is a hack -- I really enjoyed his latest movie, Rango, also starring Depp. But three Pirates movies was probably enough for him.

So yeah, here I am, pondering seeing the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie in the theater this weekend. Even though I saw neither of the previous two Pirates movies in the theater, and ended up hating them when I did see them.

Hollywood is a strange place sometimes. I mean, who would have thought that the fifth Fast and the Furious would be the one people seemed to like best?

I guess it's just proof that the quality of a movie is all about who you've got on board for this particular installment, not the baggage carried in by all the movies that might have come before it. What I can't decide is whether it's a good thing that movies have a chance to peak in quality very late in the timeline of their particular franchise. On the one hand, if it's a good movie, it's worth having around in the world. On the other hand, it'll just encourage more studios to send more franchises off into further and further chapters.

Especially when Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides makes at least $80 million this weekend. And possibly more like $100 million.

So not the last one

Over the years since 2004, when the first Saw was released, I have come to acknowledge that I am a Saw completist.

I knew after the execrable second Saw and the ridiculous fourth Saw couldn't turn me away, I'd be sure to see them all, eventually -- usually before the next one hit theaters. In fact, always before the next one hit theaters, if memory serves.

But because the movies have been so ludicrous, it was with some amount of relief that I greeted the arrival of Saw 3D -- later redubbed Saw: The Final Chapter for its DVD release -- last October. Okay, I can finally be done, I thought.

On Sunday I went to the local Redbox machine in "celebration" of having won my college basketball pool -- with so many upsets this year, we didn't even need to go to the final weekend to determine a winner. I'd been searching for something cheesy-bad, with Skyline as my target. But it looks like Skyline is still within its 28-day window where Redbox doesn't yet carry it, so Saw: The Final Chapter jumped out as my next logical contender. Celebrate the end of the basketball pool (and winnings of $170) with the end of the Saw series.

Not so fast.

Never have I seen a "last" movie have so many loose ends. In fact, except for the death of a character who's been around for the last couple installments, and the return of another who'd been gone a lot longer than that, there's nothing about the "final" Saw that's really different than the other six Saws that came before it.

Stop reading now if you really don't want me to reveal any spoilers about Saw VII. (Maybe I'll just call it that from here on out, since neither Saw 3D nor Saw: The Final Chapter seems exactly accurate anymore.)

Okay, so for the last four installments or so we've know that the life's work of Jigsaw has been picked up by a detective named Rick Hoffman (Costas Mandylor). See, Jigsaw has now been dead for more Saw sequels than he was alive -- he died at the end of the third. I think it was at the end of the fourth that we learned about Hoffman's involvement, though they all tend to bleed together (pun intended) at this point.

At the end of the sixth, Hoffman looks like he'd had the tables turned on him by another insider -- Jill Kramer (Betsy Russell), Jigsaw's ex-wife (or is it widow? I can't remember). I can't remember how she did it, but she got him into the trap that has appeared most regularly in the Saw movies: the device that goes around your head and will rip your face open if you don't stop it within 60 seconds. Early in Saw VII, though, we learn that Hoffman escaped that trap with only a torn cheek, and now is out for Jill's blood. She goes to the police in hopes of being protected in exchange for her testimony.

Suffice it to say it doesn't go that way. Hoffman spends the movie systematically breaking into the station where Jill is being held and killing off all the people who would be guarding her, all the while luring a large contingent of other officers away from the station on a goose chase to catch him -- which also dooms them. Yeah, it's a bloodbath -- police are dying left and right in this movie. This is to say nothing of all the people getting killed in the movie's featured "long trap," which involves a fraudulent survivor (Sean Patrick Flanery), who wrote a book about surviving a Jigsaw trap that never happened, going through a series of tests to try to reach his wife before she's killed at the end of the hour. At each step of the way one of his co-conspirators buys it. Then there are also a couple isolated traps that have nothing to do with either of these narratives, except that they were set by Hoffman (or so we believe). They've upped the death quotient in this one, if nothing else.

Hoffman succeeds at killing everyone, and then, fairly anticlimactically, straps the same device to Jill's head. Sixty seconds usually take about three minutes of screen time to transpire in a Saw movie, but here, Jill just sits there for a minute that lasts about ten seconds, and then her head explodes. If we're real romantics we could say that now she's reunited with her dead ex-husband.

As Hoffman leaves the station following this massive slaughter, he's approached by three figures in cloaks and animal masks -- or, I should say, "animal heads," because their entire heads are covered. We've seen these figures kidnapping future victims in past Saw movies. They inject him with something to put him to sleep. One removes his mask, and it's Dr. Gordon (Cary Elwes) -- the man who cuts off his own foot to survive the original Saw, eons ago now. This is not as shocking as we might think, since the movie opened with a flashback to Gordon's torment, and he's later seen at a survivor's meeting, where he has some cryptic words for Flanery's faux survivor. It turns out Gordon has been Jigsaw's other assistant all these years. It's a bit facile -- like anything we see in a Saw movie isn't facile -- because they already used that same gimmick in Saw II and III, where Shawnee Smith survived a trap and then became a Jigsaw disciple. But whatever.

Okay, so Gordon leaves Hoffman chained to the same pipe he was chained to, way back in the first Saw. There are still at least two dead bodies lying in this location, nothing more than skeletons by this point. I guess that's chilling, because it means that in all this time, the police still haven't found this location -- it must be pretty remote. And then the movie ends with Hoffman panicking and Gordon saying "Game over!" to him as he closes the sliding door, leaving Hoffman there in the dark. That's at least the third Saw movie that's ended with this door being closed on somebody.

Okay, so what have we really "resolved"? Not much. Jill Kramer is dead, but she was always a pretty passive character -- things were always happening to her, and that's no different in this movie, where she spends most of the time cowering in a jail cell. Hoffman is not dead, and the situation he finds himself in is not by any means a death sentence. You'd think he was worse off at the end of Saw VI, when he had the head-exploder strapped around his melon. A bunch of police are dead, but that doesn't matter because they were only just introduced to us. Gordon is not dead, and in fact, even with only one good foot, he makes a pretty good candidate to continue Jigsaw's legacy. And who are those other two people who never took off their animal masks? Then there's the faux survivor, Bobby, who didn't save his wife (she got heated up to the boiling point inside some kind of cauldron), but didn't die either. In fact, there was a peculiar lack of resolution to his storyline, even though it just began in this installment.

No Saw VIII? Really?

Okay, so if there is going to be a Saw VIII, at least it's not coming out this October. I looked up Tobin Bell, the only actor who figures to definitely return for another Saw (who has appeared in flashback in the last four movies now), on IMDB, and Saw VIII is not his next project. If it were coming out in October, we'd know about it.

But I had a bit of a scare when I googled "Saw 8" and came up with a bunch of entries, one of which included the following poster art:


Granted, it doesn't look ready for primetime and was likely made on somebody's home computer, but just for a second, I thought "REALLY??" History is full of examples of series that continued on past what was supposed to be the "last" installment, but I thought it would be particularly disingenuous to say that it's the last one, and then not even miss one Halloween before putting out the next.

So we will indeed have Halloween 2011 off from Saw movies, but I wouldn't be so sure about 2012. If there's one thing the legion of scribes who've written Saw movies have shown, it's a commitment to the series' warped sense of cohesiveness. You may think they've just kept making movies that involved some variation on the iconic killing devices we've seen in these movies, but they've done more than that -- they've tried to keep the storyline internally consistent and plausible. Usually they've failed stupendously in this regard, but even the attempt to maintain a comprehensible narrative throughline is commendable in its sheer sense of crazy ambitiousness.

So expect those dangling threads at the end of Saw VII to be resolved at some point. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but by 2013 at the latest.

If legends never die, as the fake Saw VIII poster suggests, neither do successful movie franchises.

A Wimpy sequel despite a wimpy box office

I don't know much about the Diary of a Wimpy Kid phenomenon, if it even rises to the level of a phenomenon. I'm too old to read the books, and my child is not yet old enough. (He's not old enough to read anything -- during story time, he just slaps his hand against the pages.)

But I do know that the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie did not light the world on fire when it was released last March. It made a certainly decent $64 million domestically, according to IMDB, including $22 million in its opening weekend -- pretty impressive for March, I guess. And I also acknowledge that the profitability of a film is a function of its budget, not its ticket sales in an absolute sense. Since Diary of a Wimpy Kid cost $15 million to make, it made a healthy 50 million bucks. And that's just here in the U.S., although I doubt a movie like this does gangbuster business overseas.

However, I don't think you can argue that $64 million is enough to call it an unqualified hit. There are certain people out there who take their kids to every single movie that's both available and suitable, just to give them something to do for 90 minutes on a weekend. Considering that, and considering the staggering box office totals of some other brand-name kids franchises, $64 million seems fairly modest.

So I was a little surprised to see a theatrical sequel to Diary of a Wimpy Kid materialize only a year later. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules comes out today, and I guess they're trying to get slightly older demographics involved -- Ke$ha's "Tik Tok" plays during the ads I've seen on TV this week.

Whether or not there should be a Diary of a Wimpy Kid sequel is not really why I'm writing today. I'm actually writing to discuss the phenomenon of committing yourself to a franchise, come hell or high water. Once you've started turning a popular book series into a potential franchise, at what costs do you keep it going?

The most relevant example here is probably the Chronicles of Narnia movies, which I seem to keep coming back to on my blog. There are seven Narnia books, and you better bet Walden Media wanted to make them all into movies when they started out. After all, having what will ultimately be eight Harry Potter movies didn't prove too difficult for Warner Brothers, as people kept on ponying up the money to see those.

But the box office totals have gotten consistently less satisfying with each new installment, ever since The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was considered an unqualified hit, turning an estimated $180 million budget into a $291 million domestic gross. (To say nothing of the overseas grosses, but if you know me you know I like taking a United States-centric view on things like this -- if only because I have historically been interested in domestic gross figures, as something I find easier to comprehend, compare and contrast.)

However, after the third installment, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, earned only $104 million on an estimated $155 million budget (figures from IMDB), it had to give them pause. About as much pause as the fairly unmarketable names of the next two books, The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy.

If you lose $50 million on a movie, clearly you stop, right? But it's not that simple. The Chronicles of Narnia is one of the most well-known brand names in all of fantasy literature. Setting out to make seven movies, and ultimately making only three, damages the brand on the whole. It's most likely that financial considerations would take precedence, but still -- I'd argue that Walden Media would be a lot more likely to press onward, despite the uphill battle, just for the purposes of bringing the endeavor in to the finish line, its grace and pride still intact.

Well, here's to writing blog posts in real time rather than planning them out first. I just checked and found that there are plans for a fourth Narnia movie -- but it will be the sixth Narnia novel. Apparently, they're jumping past those two awkwardly named books and going straight to another one with a good marketing hook: The Magician's Nephew. (Let's just hope people don't associate it too closely with last summer's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which didn't light the world on fire either.) In fact, according to wikipedia, this decision was just officially announced on Tuesday.

Seems like a good way to save face. Instead of making seven movies, make five. Because once they make The Magician's Nephew, they'll have to finish off with The Last Battle, right? It's got a marquee-friendly name, and it would conclude the series. It's much harder to stop 80% of the way there than 40%.

Another good movie to discuss in this context is The Golden Compass, the only movie from what was supposed to be a franchise based on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials novels. I liked that movie, but I guess a lot of people didn't -- and not only the religious folks who protested its apparently pagan undertones. (Which only made me root harder for it to succeed.) It was pretty clear there would be no other movies made, and getting out after only one just means that it was a theatrical non-starter, and that was that. It wasn't that famous of a property to begin with.

I think the dilemma faced by Walden Media is a bit more tough. If they had made The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and it had only done okay, they could have just stopped there without it seeming too awkward. Sure, many of us would have guessed that they planned to continue onward and make all the novels, but the story is pretty self-contained, so it could have stood on its own without there being too much egg on anyone's face. I think when you get started with a long project and then you have to stop, that's when the stink of failure starts to attach itself.

So what does all this have to do with a modest sequel to a modest movie about a modest elementary school student?

Let me know if you figure it out.

Series I'm glad I've seen none of

1. Big Momma - Big Momma's House (2000), Big Momma's House 2 (2006), Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son (2011)

2. Ernest - Ernest Goes to Camp (1987), Ernest Saves Christmas (1988), Ernest Goes to Jail (1990), Ernest Scared Stupid (1991), Ernest Rides Again (1993), Ernest Goes to School (1994), Ernest Goes to Africa (1997), Ernest in the Army (1988)

3. Ghoulies - Ghoulies (1985), Ghoulies 2 (1987), Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College (1991), Ghoulies IV (1994)

Series I'm surprised I've seen none of:

1. Dirty Harry - Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), The Dead Pool (1988)

2. Nightmare on Elm Street - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985), A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988), A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989), Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), Freddy vs. Jason (2003), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

3. Transporter - The Transporter (2002), Transporter 2 (2005), Transporter 3 (2008)

Series I'm embarrassed to have seen all of:

1. Left Behind - Left Behind: The Movie (2000), Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002), Left Behind: World at War (2005)

2. Harold and Kumar - Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008)

3. Saw* - Saw (2004), Saw II (2005), Saw III (2006), Saw IV (2007), Saw V (2008), Saw VI (2009), Saw 3D (2010)*

* - I have yet to see Saw 3D, now called Saw: The Final Chapter. But I thought having seen six of the seven Saws was embarrassing enough to be worth including.