I feel a bit like a prostitute for putting out two number threes in one year,” Matt Damon, the star of Ocean’s 13 and the forthcoming The Bourne Ultimatum, recently admitted. Passing swiftly over his co-star George Clooney’s response that “it’s better than three number twos”, it’s easy to sympathise with Damon. The recent Pirates of the Caribbean and Spider-Man “threequels” and, indeed, the third in the Ocean’s series, have all remained resolutely faithful to the law of diminishing returns. Plots creaked. Actors flagged. Franchises slowly ran out of steam.

But if there’s one thing worse than a number three, it’s a number four. Episode IV of a series is generally the point at which the good ideas, flogged to within an inch of their life in the previous three instalments, keel over completely. To mask this deficiency, the journeyman director takes one of several paths. Firstly, he can shamelessly rehash the previous three films and hope that nobody notices. See here Friday the 13th Part 4, Halloween 4 and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, all of which proved as hard to kill off as their teen-stalking antiheroes.

The second option is to go back in time and embark on a dreaded prequel. The most infamous example of this benighted cinematic phenomenon is, of course, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, in which the timeless magic of the original trilogy was replaced with a tiresome dirge on galactic taxation. More recently came Hannibal Rising, in which a hormonal Hannibal Lecter takes his first steps in the exciting world of cannibalism. It wasn’t very good.

A potentially more favourable ruse is to pick up the main players and plonk them down in a new location. This craven bid for novelty value has actually been known to work. While nobody would put it up there with Raging Bull, Rocky IV does have a certain bombastic charm. And, when Kirk, Spock and Bones touched down in 1980s San Francisco and grappled with all manner of anachronistic obstacles in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the franchise had one of its best instalments.

Far better that route than making the fatal mistake of surrendering script duties to your leading man, as Sidney J. Furie did with Christopher Reeve in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. The Man of Steel may be able to leap tall buildings, but scooping up the Earth’s nuclear weapons in a huge net? Please.

Still, even that half-baked farrago pales in comparison to the daddy of all number fours, Batman & Robin, a film whose dearth of inspiration earned it its own category of awfulness. It also happened to star a certain Mr Clooney. Perhaps George should screen it for Matt Damon – it will make him feel a lot better about his own sequel shame.

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