It is easy (relatively speaking) to write (and sell) a trilogy of books. You need only to pay one guy with a typewriter, and printing costs. The Lord of The Rings feels like a Trilogy because it was written as such (though Tolkien did prove he could sell books with The Hobbit first)
Games and movies cost a lot more to make. They involve thousands of people and expensive technologies. They are a huge gamble. Take Star Wars (original trilogy of course) or Back to the Future. The first movie of each is a self-contained story with a clear end, maybe with a hint at a follow-up (Vader is still alive, Doc arrives at Marty's in the DeLorean) but if the movies had flopped, then no harm, no foul. The movies stand on their own.
At the end of ANH, The Death Star blew up. A the end of BTTF Marty's dad is no longer a wimp and Biff is a total loser only fit
to wax Marty's truck. At the end of ME1 a Reaper gets blown up but good. Big
epic victories.
The box office success of those movies green lighted the following two movies. TESB and ROTJ, and the two successive back to the future movies, are far more closely intertwined. They proved they could make money with the first one, and now they are able to make two movies with the middle one being less "epic" and less able to stand on its own, and with a bigger cliff hanger.
In TESB The Empire is still rampaging happily. No one even *mentions* the Death Star blew up. What was really accomplished by ANH? Apparently nothing. All they managed to do in TESB was lose Han Solo, barely saving Luke, minus one hand, and the Rebel Alliance had to flee out of the Galaxy entirely. Conveniently, whenever BTTF II Marty intersects with BTTF I Marty, he was off-screen in the first one. At the end of BTTF II Marty manages to get himself stuck in 1955 and Doc to get himself blown up in the DeLorean. Compared to them, Sheploo did pretty well. People even remember him/her saving the Citadel, and he/she did take out the Collectors, with his/her team more (or less) intact.
Bioware proved they could make money with the Franchise, and the following two games were greenlighted. I think we're going to see a far greater integration of ME2 and ME3. Returning squadmates and meaningful choices have now a greater chance of really carrying over because ME2 was developed with ME3 in mind, whereas ME1 was developed with the possibility, NOT the certainty, that the trilogy would carry on.
But we'll have to fight an army of indoctrinated teddy bears husks on a Western-themed planet. Can't win em all.
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