Some films are just so self-contained, so succinct, so sublime, that they just don't need a sequel. What they need is a franchise.

So we've put together a few pitches for a handful of the greatest movie serials since Star Wars. No need to thank us, Hollywood. Just get on with making the following...

Citizen Kane (1941)

The Film: The life and times of Charles Foster Kane, who starts life as a Social Service advocating liberal, slowly descending into power-hunger madness as his publishing empire grows.

Why it works as a stand-alone feature: It spans the entire life of it’s main character, beginning after he died and looking retrospectively at the events that shaped his existence.

Where the franchise could have gone: The catalyst for the whole film were the dying words of Kane, ‘Rosebud’. More films could expand on other statements or incidents from Kane’s life.

More Citizen Kane: “You can’t buy a bag of peanuts in this town without someone writing a song about you” sees Kane flashback to his days in a Jazz skiffle band.

Intent on playing the annual Summer Fete, the band practice hard, but Kane’s overwhelming thirst for power and exertion of control tear the band apart.

Citizen Kane Again: “You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war” sparks a journalist to investigate the facts surrounding several recent foreign wars.

The hack discovers that not only did the wars not happen, Kane simply made up many of the countries where conflict was supposedly taking place, and we flashback to Kane engineering the fake wars, Wag The Dog style.

Citizen Kane Jr: Elected President of his Junior High, Kane goes about systematically ensuring all of his election promises are kept.

But his ideals are tested when he is forced into dodgy backhanded techniques in order to secure his demands, and is ultimately corrupted by the power the position gives him over his fellow students.

Next: Schindler's List