Name a Franchise that bounced back from the brink.

[Princess Niki]

After so much negativity lately lets have a positive thread with hope as the main point.

So name a franchise movie, tv show or video game you think has bounced back from the brink of failure and is finally having a bright shiny future again.

 

[Spirit]

Hmmmm....... Hmm....

..... Hmmm mmmm.

Digimon, I guess. Everything was crap after season three up until Adventure Tri (even though Tri had a lot of issues) and Cyber Sleuth came around. Now we're doing well.

The Adventure reboot is looking decent, Survive is looking decent, Kizuna looks decent (can't wait to finally see it).

And there will hopefully be a reveal of the next 'Story' game some time this year.


Other than that though this thread is really difficult. Sign of the Times I guess.

 

[Sheikah_Witch]

assassins creed. I’ve never played Odyssey or Origins, but after more and more soulless annual entries, the franchise took a year off and returned back to relevance.

 

[mαrkαsscoρ]

I wanna say spyro and crash but there is something that's holding me back: there still technically hasn't been a new game

yeah they both made a great comeback w/ their remake trilogies, but they're not "new" games, the last installments for them was still 12 years ago, of course that doesn't take away the fact that they're both back in the spotlight and the groundwork has been laid for great things to come, but until those great things actually come, I wouldn't say that either has made a complete resurgence

I'll give CTR nitro fueled some credit though, the amount of content added to it basically makes it a brand new game, despite the story mode being the same

and I'll toss in Mega Man, b/c at least 11 was an actual new game, but I wonder how long until they announce a X9 or god almighty, LEGENDS 3

 

[DJ Twitch]

The Pokemon anime recovered from Best Wishes for a while with the XY saga, but it started sucking again right after that.

 

[Cfrock]

Might be a little early to say it, but Halo. Halos 1–3 were juggernauts of increasing popularity and success. Reach was big, but it was also divisive. The competitive crowd really didn't like it and Bungie left the franchise after that (technically before it had even run its course — 343 made the final map pack for it and had been handling the matchmaking for some time). Then Halo 4 came along and changed the art style to something everyone hates, introduced enemies so bad even 343 did a GDC talk about how bad they were, and made the multiplayer more like Call of Duty, stripping Halo of a lot of its identity.

Halo 5 was ambitious, I guess, but 343 could not have done a worse job with it. It was a disaster on every level, so much so that 343 basically restarted development on Halo 6 in the wake of the backlash. I've heard (though not confirmed) that 343 are scrubbing Halo 5 from canon, basically pretending it never happened.

Halo 5 could have ended Halo as a franchise, it was that bad. But 343 took it on the chin and adjusted course. We've seen nothing of Halo Infinite (a cutscene of some guy looking at a hologram isn't 'the game', we've yet to see a single second of the actual game), but there is quiet optimism surrounding it. 343 finally brought the Master Chief Collection to PC, too, and are rolling it out gradually to avoid the disaster that was the Xbox One launch. So far things have been going well, and with Halo 2 coming in the next few months I expect the MCC will become even more popular going forward.

So Halo survived the catastrophe that was Halo 5 and is likely to get more popular and relevant than its been in years over the next few months.

 

[Quin]

I can't think of any series that actually did almost **** up but managed to bounce back, but I can think of a few that personally did for me.

First the obvious one, Zelda. The whole era after Wind Waker and before BOTW was kind of a dark era for me. None of the games were bad, mind you, but that era definitely has my least favorite zelda games.
SS and TP are my least and second least favorite 3D zeldas, De DS games speak for themselfs, and triforce heroes(and Skyward Sword) almost made me quit the series because I was starting to hate the direction the series went in. A Link Between Worlds is the exception and was a fantastic entry but that wasn't enough.
BOTW made me fall in love with the series all over again though.

Smash. Even for someone who plays Smash more casually like me, Melee was still the best gameplay wise. Brawls sheer content couldn't beat that, although I still enjoyed the heck out of that game. Smash 4 a bit less though. I didn't like most newcomers, the gameplay still wasn't there, and it didn't have any cool modes (except smash run stuck on the better 3ds version). Not a bad game and I still played it a lot with friends, but my least favorite smash so far. I had less and less hope for the new smash and hearing it might have been a smash 4 port didn't get my hopes up.
Ultimate however turned out to be my favorite smash now. It has the content I wanted, and the gameplay, although not as fast as melee, is still very good. I wish it had more single player modes but I'll settle with this.

Monster Hunter. Most (G rank) entries were some of my favorite games ever. Freedom Unite, 3 Ultimate, 4 Ultimate. All top notch games that any fan of the series should play. However, I really hated what they were doing with generations. The new monsters were okay, but I hated the styles and Hunter arts. While also trying to be an anniversary game, (something 4U did way better) it also removed the soul of the series. No cool monster cutscenes, removed the story, terrible quest progression, terrible deviants both in design and fights, loaded with AOE attacks straight out of Monster hunter Frontier, ruined the fight of lagiacrus, one of my favorite 3U monsters, terrible hyper gimmick, and removed the diva song from the credits for some loli idol song for pete's sakes.
the only thing I liked, playing as a cat, wasn't even really valid, unless you got a perfect boomerang cat which took a lot of RNG. Then Gen U came, which was just more of what I already disliked, so that made things even worse.
After Gen U I totally didn't expect them announcing Monster Hunter World, which basically fixed most issues I had with Gen/U. And now with the Iceborne expansion, its probably my favorite Monster Hunter title right now.

Basically my I got disappointed in my top 3 game series but they all 3 bounced back (kinda) recently.

 

[Mido]

I know I'm jumping on the optimism train much too early, but I want to believe that in some respects, Starlink: Battle for Atlas can do this for Star Fox as a series. While it is a whole separate series with a different story and differing gameplay features, the content with the team did something the series proper had not done in fourteen years: advance the story. It was a simple story with the Star Fox team simply hunting down an old rival, but it was a fun story. I think it demonstrated that the series does not need to be flashy in its execution, but can practice simplistic consistency to get Star Fox in the most hip of directions!

 

[ExLight]

the first thing that comes to my mind is Resident Evil bouncing back from the somewhat lame RE6 and RE:ORC into fantastic games like RE7 and the REmakes