"I think we might have killed the franchise."
Sometimes a sequel sucks. Sometimes it sucks, but leaves the possibility open that the followup will be better and that this is just a blip in the quality of the franchise. Then sometimes it sucks so much that it kills the franchise stone dead, destroying the producers'/publishers' hopes for further sequels. In a variation, maybe the sequel was genuinely decent, but not enough to erase the sins of the previous entries and Win Back the Crowd. In the most extreme cases, it can even take the producer/publisher down with it, or even the entire genre itself.
Occasionally a few Franchise Killers over too short a period (or one really bad one) can put a whole genre out of favour for a while. Even the executives could tell when it's time to stop following the leader.
Note that sometimes the franchise turns out to be Not Quite Dead, and can be salvaged with a Continuity Reboot. If the franchise experiences what should have been a Franchise Killer but carries on regardless, it's a Franchise Zombie. Occasionally it's a Stillborn Franchise, an all-new product for which plans for sequels were made and then scrapped when it was discovered that the product was crap, or so hyped up that the creators had unrealistic expectations of its success. Or it just didn't profit enough, even though it was a Cult Classic.
Sometimes, if the hope for any more follow-ups is extremely unlikely, if not outright impossible, fans will resort to doing a follow-up themselves, through a Spiritual Successor or an outright Fan Sequel.
For many Video Game companies, shipping a Franchise Killer is also a Creator Killer, either through bankruptcy, no-one wanting to forward them the funding to continue making games, or in the modern world of mega-corporations owning every studio as a subsidiary of the larger corporation, the executives in charge of the conglomerate deciding to shut the studio having wrung the last vestiges of profit out of the intellectual property the studio was bought for, or using them as scapegoats for poor performance financially speaking. Or in some cases, actual poor performance as a studio.
Compare Creator Killer, Genre Killer, Trend Killer, and Star-Derailing Role. Also compare Stillborn Franchise, where an attempted franchise ends due to the failure of its first installment, and Torch the Franchise and Run, where a writer is deliberately trying to kill a franchise by making such a big mess of it that no one can continue it without using Prequels, Retcons or just rebooting the whole thing. See also Tough Act to Follow, where one work in a series is seen as so good that subsequent installments are seen as not worth the time and money.
(As TV Tropes does not know time, please wait either 5 years after the last installment's release or for official confirmation by the creators before adding an example.)
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Asian Animation
- While Chinese animated Lilo & Stitch Spin-Off Stitch & Ai did not kill off the franchise as a whole, as proven by Stitch & the Samurai in 2020 and Agent Stitch in 2022, its lack of international success and brief thirteen-episode run with no second season in sight after five years since its airing has become a sure sign that the little blue alien Stitch will no longer receive any more animated TV shows for the foreseeable future.
Comic Books
- Despite selling well for a comic based on an animated series, Adventure Time: Season 11 not only was cancelled due to sales not meeting expectations from Cartoon Network, but it also killed the franchise in the comic book market. No other comic book series was announced after Adventure Time: Marcy and Simon finished its run, excluding one final graphic novel featuring Fionna and Cake and trade paperback re-releases of old issues. Plus the annoucement of Adventure Time: Distant Lands miniseries on HBO Max made Season 11 look redundant and unnecessary.
- In the mid-2000s, DC decided to create the All-Star DC Comics line, which took place outside of standard continuity with the intent of getting to the core of what made their main characters interesting. Unfortunately, the first two books to be released were All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder and All-Star Superman, which killed the line from two different directions. Batman & Robin, coming out in the midst of Frank Miller's Creator Breakdown, was a widely derided mess that suffered from massive delays and became generally viewed as So Bad, It's Good. On the other hand, Superman was a huge critical and sales success, won three Eisner awards, and became generally regarded as one of the best Superman stories of the decade. This left the line with a seriously tainted name on one end and a Tough Act to Follow on the other, and consequently, the various All-Star projects languished in Development Hell before being Quietly Cancelled. The name did reappear for the miniseries All-Star Batman about a decade later, but it was written in standard continuity, lacked the subline's original branding, and has no connection to either of the prior books (though Scott Snyder does claim he wrote it in the spirit of All-Star Superman).
- Asterix: The 33rd album, "The Falling Sky", was lambasted by both fans and critics in 2005, essentially for being a rant against mangas by Albert Uderzo and for being too outlandish compared to the series' core concept. Uderzo then made Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book only because the series needed a Milestone Celebration in 2009. It took until 2013 to see a new proper adventure and the series' relaunch, Asterix and the Picts, by a new team of creators (Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad).
- With the moderate success of Avengers: The Initiative and Avengers Academy, the concept of the Avengers running a school seemed to become a vital part of The Avengers line. Then Avengers Arena pissed away all the fan goodwill, and with follow-up Avengers Undercover selling so badly that only 10 out of a planned 12 issues saw the light of day, the concept was buried for 10 years, with Avengers Academy not being revisited again until 2024.
- Marvel's Disney Kingdoms: The Enchanted Tiki Room series sold poorly and thus was the last one in this line of comics.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
- Sonic the Hedgehog/Mega Man: Worlds Unite, the second crossover between Sonic and Mega Man, did this to four comic book series. The intention was that the crossover would use characters from other Sega and Capcom series, but this meant Archie Comics had to sink a lot of money into licensing fees and paying various artists to do so with the hope it would make back the money. It was also a last-ditch attempt to save the Mega Man (Archie Comics) comic, which was suffering in sales by that point. Sadly, however, the response was lukewarm at best and Archie was barely able to recoup their losses. As such, the Mega Man comic was put on an indefinite hiatus. Sonic Boom (Archie Comics) was canceled shortly after due to negative reception from Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric. Ultimately, this even ended up affecting the main Sonic comic and its spin-off Sonic Universe, since the crossover stalled the main storylines of those series and contributed to poor sales, though the comic suffering from the Ken Penders v. Archie Comics lawsuit didn't help. With all the cuts Archie was doing due to the relaunch of their own comics, July of 2017 saw them lose the publishing rights for the North American Sonic and Mega Man comics to IDW Publishing and Boom! Studios respectively, who enacted a full Continuity Reboot and effectively put an end to both Archie franchises. It was also the End of an Age for any concepts and elements from Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) used in American Sonic media outside the comics up until the release of Sonic Adventure enforced the franchise worldwide to follow the Japanese continuity completely, given how Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW) does not feature any characters from the show and the old comic (even the ones Ian Flynn created). As for Mega Man, the license went from Archie to UDON (the publishers behind the Street Fighter comic) who choose to reprint Mega Man Megamix in color, but it wasn't until when Boom Studios picked up the license to the Mega Man franchise that a new comic book series began, and even then, it was an adaptation of the short-lived Mega Man: Fully Charged cartoon. However, Boom Studios’ rights to Mega Man seem to have expired, as in 2024 UDON would regain the comic book rights to the Blue Bomber, with plans to release new comics in 2025, and a planned relaunch of the Archie run being announced in 2026.
- Earlier than that, the atrocious reception of the fifteenth Super Sonic Special, featuring the infamous "Naugus Games" story where multiple pages had no artwork at all, killed the yearly series stone dead.
- Star Trek (IDW) had its comics put on ice after the failure of Star Trek Beyond made the possibility of a fourth film very uncertain.
- Supergirl: An odd case concerning the character - the Box-Office Bomb that was her movie ended up souring DC so badly that they allowed Marv Wolfman to kill her during Crisis on Infinite Earths. This also caused DC to declare a "Superman is the Sole Survivor of Krypton" mandate that exiled characters like Krypto the Superdog and popular villain General Zod. While a Supergirl would show up three years later, the concept of Supergirl being Kara Zor-El, Clark's Kryptonian cousin, would not happen for 18 years afterward in The Supergirl from Krypton (2004).
- Marvel attempted to resurrect its romance comics as an imprint. Sadly, the first series they launched for it was Trouble (Marvel Comics), a book that became so hated and infamous it quickly also become the last book in that imprint.
- Ultimatum dealt the Ultimate Marvel line a blow it would never recover from. Aside from its general poor quality, a result of its writer Jeph Loeb suffering a massive Creator Breakdown following the death of his son, it was such a massive bombshell to the setting's status quo (killing off dozens of characters and forcing the fallout of wide-scale devastation onto the world) that the series had lost its nature as a new-reader-friendly Adaptation Distillation, and none of the damage it did could be reversed due to the All Deaths Final mandate. The Ultimate Marvel line did manage to keep going for some years, but it had gone from going toe-to-toe with and even outselling its main-universe counterpart at its height to limping in the lower rungs of the sales charts, with only Ultimate Spider-Man (2000) (the comic least affected by Ultimatum) managing to maintain a significant following. One of the later books to come out outright called the universe "broken", and it all culminated in the Ultimate universe being destroyed in Secret Wars (2015). While several of the original Ultimate era characters would eventually make their way into mainline stories, it still would take years for a new Ultimate universe to revitalize the line when the Maker, Reed Richards' corrupted Ultimate counterpart, created a new universe as the setting for a revival.
Literature
- Goosebumps Series 2000 suffered serious Executive Meddling that deepened tensions
between R. L. Stine and Scholastic Press. Whereas the original Goosebumps book series ran for six years and 62 books, Series 2000 ended after only two years and 25 books, as Stine was so fed up that he decided not to renew the contract. Stine would move on to the unrelated but similar children's horror series The Nightmare Room and Mostly Ghostly, neither of which was published by Scholastic.note It wouldn't be until 2008 when the series was Un-Canceled with the Goosebumps HorrorLand books.
Music
- The violence at Altamont killed not only Meredith Hunter, but the whole idea of the "peace, love and music" late-'60s outdoor rock festival that Monterey had pioneered and Woodstock made legendary.
- Travis Scott's Astroworld festival has apparently met its end in the wake of the crowd rush on the 2021 event's first day, which led to the deaths of ten people and the injuries of over 300 more. The planned second day was cancelled, and Astroworld hasn't held an event since.
- Australia's Big Day Out festival seems to have been killed by its disastrous 2014 shows. Two shows were planned for Sydney, but the second was cancelled after Blur pulled out and many people accepted the offer of a refund. Most ticketholders treated the event as a very expensive Pearl Jam and Arcade Fire double bill. The festival's director AJ Maddah then stepped down and sold his share to the Texan company C3 Presents, which was already a part owner. C3 has not staged a Big Day Out since.
- Hello! Project had wanted to set up overseas groups around Asia and attempted to break into the Chinese market by setting up Hello! Project Taiwan in 2008. However, Hello! Project Taiwan's flagship group, Ice Creamusume, bombed so badly that their career only lasted for three months (plus a concert appearance in July). This caused Hello! Project to scale back on expanding overseas.
- The death blow to The Love Parade, a German electronic music festival, was delivered by the stampede at the 2010 event, where bad design of the location led to a crush and the deaths of 21 people.
- The Rockstar Mayhem Festival came to an end after a lackluster and difficult tour in 2015. Many sponsors (such as Sumerian, Metal Blade, and various alcohol sponsors) backed out of sponsoring the event for that year, leading to Rockstar having No Budget and having to scrape by with whatever band wasn't booked that summer. Even with Slayer and King Diamond headlining, they just couldn't anchor a festival the size of Mayhem. The end result was Rockstar calling 2015 the last year for the Mayhem festival. The death of the Mayhem Festival also killed Rockstar's Uproar festival too. Mayhem was going to return in 2020, but the COVID-19 Pandemic ended up cancelling the tour before any announcements were made.
- After the violent and criminal tragedies of Woodstock '99, the owners of the Woodstock name have gone on record to say it will never be used again, and indeed it would be a full decade before the name was used in connection with a reunion tour featuring many performers from the original Woodstock. There were talks of using the Woodstock name for a 50th anniversary event in 2019, but the event ended up getting cancelled.
Professional Wrestling
- There have been a few instances of WWE retiring pay-per-view names as a result of certain events:
- The "Over the Edge" name was retired as a result of the accident at the 1999 event that killed Owen Hart, and the ensuing bad publicity the event got as a result.
- The "Battleground" name was retired following the 2017 event, which was widely panned as the worst of the year's events- best exemplified by its main event, which saw the return of the heavily panned Punjabi Prison match as part of the ill-advised title run of Jinder Mahal. The name, however, would return as an NXT event in 2023.
Tabletop Games
- Although Dungeons & Dragons recovered and is even stronger than it was before in the 2010s, the 2008 4th Edition was very nearly a franchise killer. The pantheon, magic system, and Forgotten Realms primary setting were completely overhauled. The rules had a distinct focus on "tactical" combat encounters and miniatures, with few provisions for playing in the "theater of the mind" style. Major changes made to balance out character types by giving all of the classes sets of powers that recharged by encounter or game day were seen as attempts to appeal to video game fans by making D&D more like an MMO. A lot of official rulebooks were published rather quickly, which meant players needed to spend a lot of money to keep up with the game. That was on top of how the 3.5 revision of the 3rd edition had come out only five years before, meaning many players had only just recently sunk their money into 3.5 were now being told to switch to the new 4.0 system. All of these changes offended many fans of the last edition. This was compounded by Pathfinder continuing to use a version of the very popular 3.5 rules, but now as a direct competitor to the 4th edition. Many players simply switched to the more familiar Pathfinder rather than learn the new rules system, to the point Pathfinder outsold official D&D for a time. The end result was that 4th edition had the shortest lifespan (six years) of any edition of D&D and the 5th Edition has been seen very much as an improvement. note
- In the lead-up for the War of the Spark set, Wizards of the Coast announced that from that point onwards, the story of Magic: The Gathering would primarily be told through tie-in novels. The first book in the series, Ravnica, released to mixed reviews, but the second, Forsaken, was absolutely loathed by the fanbase. In addition to perceived shoddy writing and the author seeming to not have much knowledge of the source material, the book sunk the popular ship of Chandra and Nissa… by claiming that the pansexual Chandra had actually been completely straight all along. The controversy and negative reception caused Wizards of the Coast to issue an apology, quietly shelve any future plans for more tie-in novels, and go back to telling the story mainly through their website. Later stories would have Chandra and Nissa enter a relationship, cementing the novels as something both fans and creators are absolutely fine never talking about again.
- The 7th Edition Daemons of Chaos army book of Warhammer, which was so thoroughly overpowered and broken that it required the game to undergo a massive shakeup in the form of an edition change. 8th Edition's attempt to fix the system failed, leading to Warhammer being discontinued and replaced with the sequel Warhammer: Age of Sigmar.
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had a situation very similiar to Dungeons & Dragons example above. 3rd Edition of the game was basically a completely different game from previous one, alienating fans who didn't want to switch to a drastically different ruleset, making many of them make a jump to retroclone, Zweihänder and the only thing saving Warhammer Fantasy RPG from death was an Author's Saving Throw in form of the 4th Edition.
Toys
- BIONICLE (2015) and concurrently released Star Wars LEGO action figure sets were more akin to minor genre killers as they had put the so-called "Constraction" LEGO sub-theme on ice. Starting in 1999 with Slizer and rising to tremendous success with the 2001 BIONICLE franchise, this was a primarily LEGO Technic-based theme of buildable and customizable action figures that took a massive shift in 2011 with the introduction of the more modular CCBS (Character and Creature Building System) style championed by Hero Factory and other sub-series called Ultrabuilds. The 2015 BIONICLE reboot, aka Generation 2 was set up as the long-awaited return of the classic franchise, only for LEGO to pull the plug before release and reroute their budget to Ninjago, leaving G2 to bleed out with minimal, indecisive marketing and lackluster media that left both old fans and young kids cold. Though intended to last until at least 2017, the franchise was Cut Short mid-2016. Following this failure, Star Wars CCBS Constraction sets still remained on shelves for another year, before their cancellation. Post-2018, LEGO abandoned their Constraction theme as a whole and any similar concepts would be based on their standard System building style, with fewer toys, blockier designs and less articulation. While LEGO Star Wars still goes on without Constraction sets, G2 had killed BIONICLE as a franchise. Though LEGO were eager to reinvent and bring it back when the original line got discontinued, they have been reluctant to acknowledge it since 2016, only giving it an odd nod or Easter Egg here and there. The 2022 90 Years of Play anniversary set and 2023 limited gift-with-purchase freebie sets at least paid tribute to BIONICLE alongside other historic LEGO themes.
- Hero Factory itself came to a sordid end as a result of the "Invasion from Below" storyline: The reaction to the toys themselves was mid, but the tie-in animated episode was dreadful, with a noticeably lower budget, and consequently lower-quality animation and voice-acting. The episode did a poor job at advertising the toys it was meant to shill, as the Heroes' mechs got wrecked in just about every fight scene. But the real killer was the ending, which built up the Heroes making peace with the antagonists after finding out they were simply defending their home, only to suddenly shift into wiping the entire species out without a shred of remorse (Even gloating about it afterwards!). The result of this controversial ending destroyed fan trust, especially when it was revealed to be a last-minute change resulting from Executive Meddling, and the line was shuttered almost immediately.
- Two changes in the Magic Attic Club line — the shift in the late Knickerbocker era away from the unique books and adventure collections towards general all-character clothing, followed by the changes by Marie Osmond to the brand in 2003 that soured many people on the brand's direction — led to the death of the brand in 2004.
- Many S.H.Figuarts lines often have a tendency to be cancelled due to poor sales or certain figures being reviewed negatively.
- Bowser and Playset E were responsible for the cancellation of the Super Mario Bros. line due to both being poorly received. Bowser thanks to him being undersized, poorly articulated and overpriced and Playset E due to it being a pack of undersized and non-articulated enemy figures as well as it also being overpriced, as well as the fact that both sold poorly. While the Mario line has been reissued several times, SHF hasn't done any new figures in the line since Bowser and Playset E.
- The low sales of the Ash Ketchum, Team Rocket, Charizard, Blastoise and Mewtwo figures resulted in the Pokémon line being cancelled. To this day, SHF hasn't announced any more Pokémon figures.
- The very poor reception and low sales of the One Piece line resulted in the cancellation of the line until 13 years later in 2023 when it was revived.
- The poor sales of the final 2 figures in the old Naruto line (those being Boruto, a character with mixed reception and the Advanced Sage Mode Naruto, which is just the previous Sage Mode Naruto just with the cloak and scroll) lead to the line getting cancelled until 2022 (with the only "new" figure in the old line being a budget reissue of Naruto) when it was revived with all new figures of Team 7.
- The low sales of the Super Sentai line resulted in the line being discontinued in 2016 until it was revived in 2022.
- The poor reception of the Sagat figure lead to the cancellation of the Street Fighter line.
- Tamagotchi Ocean is what led to the initial downfall of Tamagotchi in the 90's due to its extreme Sequel Difficulty Spike and the Virtual Pet fad having nearly fizzled out by the time of its release. While this caused Mori de Hakken! Tamagotchi to have its international release cancelled, the franchise released several more models and licensed games in Japan only before it completely fizzled out (though Manga de Hakken! Tamagotchi would last two more years before it too got cancelled). The franchise would eventually make a comeback with the Tamagotchi Connection in 2004 and became a Long Runner since.
Visual Novels
- In 2004, ELF Corporation would attempt to blow new life into the Dōkyūsei series after it had by and large been lying dormant since 1996, where they released the spin-off Kakyūsei (the only releases in the series since then had been a Video Game Remake of the original game in 1999 and the Mahjong-themed spin-off Jankyūsei for the Gameboy Color in 2001). The project, Kakyūsei 2, was meant as a come-back of sorts, both for Elf as a developer and for the Dōkyūsei series in general, and Elf certainly set all in on its promotion, commissioning two anime series based on it and putting it directly up against the popular Rance series by releasing it on the same day as Rance VI. Elf, however, ended up stumbling in a way that might seem inconsequential in hindsight, but at the time, it was extremely drastic. The studio had prominently marketed Kakyūsei 2 as a "Pure Love Story", but one of the potential love interests, Saimon Tamaki, was in revealed in her storyline to already be in a sexual relationship with a boyfriend. The inclusion of a love interest with sexual experience, even though her storyline was just one of several and the only one to defy the expections of the genre, made fans of both the series and the genre very angry. Several of them took to the Internet forums, which were still in their adolescent state at the time, to voice their complaints, causing one of the first major Internet-based controversies in Japan. The bad word of mouth quickly caused sales to plummet, and Kakyūsei 2 ended up as a clear financial failure. Though Elf had plans about getting a proper Dōkyūsei 3 off the ground, it would never materialize and Elf would eventually shut down in 2015, with the damage to the company's image and finances caused by the controversy caused by Kakyūsei 2 being suspected of being the main reason why.
- Despite strong reviews, The Great Ace Attorney 2 was the worst-selling game in the Ace Attorney series, which has caused the Ace Attorney franchise to go on an indefinite hiatus, with the planned seventh mainline entry falling into Development Hell. Since the game's release, the only content that has come out of the franchise has been ports of previous games (including an official localization of both of The Great Ace Attorney games which saw far greater commercial success), with plans for a new entry in the series being uncertain.
Web Original
- In 2009 and 2010, EQAL, the production company behind lonelygirl15, ran a contest called The Show Is Yours for fans of the show to create an officially-sponsored, canonical Spin-Off. With the Great Recession causing them to struggle financially, EQAL had to put LG15: the resistance (the franchise's flagship show at the time) on hiatus, leading to this effort to crowdsource the show — which was already struggling under the weight of a Kudzu Plot and multiple spinoffs — and use it as a springboard to launch a social network called Umbrella. The first spinoff produced through The Show Is Yours, LG15: The Last, mostly came and went uneventfully, but the second one, LG15: Outbreak, was a disaster that suffered from a heavily Troubled Production. Gregory Austin McConnell, the creator of Outbreak, made a video going into detail about what went wrong. After Outbreak, LG15: the resistance' hiatus became permanent, and the only new material that has been so much as announced has been a one-off video in 2016.
- In the late 2000s and early '10s, Slender Man was one of the biggest names in Creepypasta, a style of ghost stories and Urban Legends born from the internet and rooted in its culture. First created on the Something Awful forums in 2009 as a paranormal hoax, it took on a life of its own afterwards as a modernized fey figure and developed an elaborate lore, with fan art, cosplay, web shows like Marble Hornets, and games like Slender popularizing it. All of that came to a halt with an infamous stabbing incident in Waukesha, Wisconsin on May 31, 2014, in which two adolescent girls who believed that Slender Man was real stabbed one of their friends as an attempted Human Sacrifice to demonstrate their loyalty to him and become his "proxies". The negative publicity from this and other incidents that were connected to Slender Man (including another stabbing in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio, an arson in Port Richey, Florida, and an epidemic of suicide attempts on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation) left a black mark on the entire creepypasta community (also weakened because its fanbase increasingly either turned to more hardcore conspiracy theories or recanted from them), and Slender Man's popularity rapidly faded, irrevocably associated with people who Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality. A 2018 film adaptation even wound up attracting controversy in light of the tragedy, with people (including the father of one of the culprits in the stabbing) criticizing it as insensitive and some theaters in the Milwaukee area choosing not to show it. This was despite attempts by the studio to make cuts to the film following the incident to avoid backlash (which resulted in the final cut's PG-13 rating as opposed to an R rating). This article by Carli Velocci for The Verge goes into more detail on Slender Man's decline, calling the 2018 film "a nail in the coffin of a dying fandom". The franchise only further collapsed after it was discovered that Adam Rosner, a creator heavily involved with the franchise and creator of the now cancelled Tribe Twelve, was a sexual predator who had attempted to groom many of his fans during the long development of his series.
- The Uncanny Valley was the final nail for the Channel Awesome anniversary specials. After To Boldly Flee, no one really wanted to do another big crossover (due to either moving away, thinking it was a Tough Act to Follow, or just being burned out). By making The Uncanny Valley an anthology, it was hoped that this would make production easier for future specials and allow the other reviewers to showcase their talent. However, aside from Darkside of the Internet and The Reviewers (which only lasted a few episodes), none of them really made any major impact on fans. This resulted in the sixth-year anniversary passing by rather uneventfully, aside from a passing mention in The Nostalgia Critic's review of Blues Brothers 2000. A 10th anniversary special, titled The Devil's Jesters, was in the works, but the mass exodus of contributors from the site following the #ChangeTheChannel movement put the kibosh on that.
- YouTube Rewind started out as a general rundown of the most notable events on the internet, but starting in 2012 they became must-watch videos thanks to a combination of notable YouTubers acting out said notable events while a remix of the biggest hits of the year played. While 2016 and 2017 wouldn't see nearly as much positive feedback, 2018's edition was arguably the point of no return as it became the most disliked video in the platform's history in record time, beating out "Baby" after it held the record for nearly 8 straight years. Factors as to why include some notable YouTubers being cast aside for celebrities, a few of them being too controversial to be prominently featured, people being generally disillusioned by YouTube, and a sense of shoehorning a message and unpopular trends over anything else. They would try again the next year by going back to the clip show format but even that was hated as it seemed like they didn't bother trying to correct what made 2018 so hated. While next year wouldn't see another Rewind due to the COVID-19 pandemic, even after it died down there hasn't been a Rewind since, with the videos later being unlisted in December 2025.
In-Universe Examples:
Films — Live-Action
- This happens in-universe at the end of Free Guy. The buggy launch of Free City 2, a cheap cash grab that doesn't have Millie and Keys' AI code, is strongly implied to have killed the potential franchise that Antwan was hoping for and ruined Soonami Games financially. Millie recognized this when she happily took the deal that gave her what was left of the code for Free City to make her own game, the successful indie title Free Life, in exchange for dropping her lawsuit against him for stealing her code, while Antwan arrogantly believed that the Free City brand was so golden that people would pay for any crap he released.