What Deadly Tactic Unites Highlander Villains and Police Academy Incompetence?

It is exceedingly rare in today’s IP-dominated movie marketplace to see an original film spawn a long-running franchise. Granted, these motion pictures aren’t always wholly original. But while they tend to be derivative of narrative formulas that have worked in the past, they are at least written from scratch with no significant assistance from a novel or a comic book or 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 in, respectively, “Highlander” and “Police Academy.” The former gave fans four feature installments over a 14-year-span, while the latter rattled off six entries once a year between 1984 and 1989 (and a late-in-the-day seventh with much of the same cast in 1994).

“Police Academy” was especially zeitgeisty, trafficking in the zany spoof gags made popular by the ZAZ team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (“Airplane!”) without itself being a spoof. The movies were basically raunchy variations on Mack Sennett’s silent Keystone Cops comedies, and, for whatever reason, they connected emphatically with moviegoers. Most importantly for Warner Bros., which released all seven films, they were made on the cheap and made loads of money at the box office. The first movie cost a total of $4.8 million and grossed $149.8 million worldwide. The entire movie series raked in a total of $537.8 million worldwide, but as the individual grosses tapered off and the budgets went up, WB lost its appetite for the crew’s calcifying law-and-order antics.

“Highlander,” starring Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery as immortal warriors, was a different deal commercially in that, with a $12.8 million worldwide gross on a $19 million budget, it lost money theatrically. The sequels also performed poorly at the box office. They were, however, hugely popular on video and cable, and went on to spawn a television series, an anime feature, novels and comic books.

So, what could possibly be “unfortunate” about two film series that made their creators a heapin’ helpin’ of cash?

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