These Movies That Were Made Just to Maintain Film Rights

Ever wondered why some movie studios keep pumping out films in long-running series, or constantly rebooting already existing stories and characters before previous iterations have had any room to breathe? More often than not, it’s nothing more than a bid to keep hold of the rights. We’ve had decades of slashers, superheroes, wizards, and Hunger Games, and while studios tend to keep franchises going simply because they’re profitable, they also do it so that the rights to certain stories and characters, which a studio or executive once bought years or decades ago, won’t revert back to their original owners.

Sometimes these frantic bids to beat the legal system just feel like regular movies. But sometimes they’re much more obvious. In these cases, the industry term for a rush-job made just so an entity can retain the legal right to a property is known as an “ashcan copy,” a phrase that comes from the world of comic books, describing the act of quickly publishing a comic not intended for sale just to keep hold of a certain trademark.

Film franchises are full of ashcan copies, some better received than others. In all of these cases, these movies were made primarily so that a film studio could retain the right to use a character or a franchise in the future—if the film turns out to be a success, that’s a nice bonus. Some of these movies are plenty obvious—of course the bajillionth Hellraiser movie was made for legal reasons rather than in the service of great works of art—but some may surprise you.