It's an approach to franchise film-making that I haven't seen attempted. Every film is unconnected to the last, so every one has full creative freedom and no continuity issues.
The closest equivalent to that I can think of is the Millennium series of Godzilla films. After Toho licensed the movie rights to TriStar, they intended to wait until TriStar had done a trilogy, then resume their own series in time for the 50th anniversary in 2004. But the first TriStar film flopped in 1998, so Toho hastily remounted its own Godzilla series. As a result, they employed a sort of "audition" process -- each of the first three Millennium films was from a different team and set in a different reality, and the plan was to see which one got the best audience response and then continue it. Instead, though, they picked the team from the second film and had them start a
fourth alternate reality (that wasn't nearly as good). That one ran for two films but didn't do well at the box office, so they dropped it and created a fifth alternate reality (their seventh overall) for the 50th-anniversary film, then ended the series.
And more recently, they rebooted yet again with
Shin Godzilla -- their eighth continuity and the first that didn't include the original 1954 film as part of its backstory -- and though they do intend to continue it, their licensing deal with Legendary requires them to hold off making more live-action Godzilla until the deal expires in 2020, so they've been doing a Godzilla anime trilogy in a ninth distinct continuity.
Of course, for most of cinematic history, film sequels had only tenuous connections to their predecessors and freely rewrote their continuity. Try watching the Universal
Frankenstein films in sequence sometime. Frankenstein's lab is in a remote windmill in the woods in the first two movies, in a structure on his estate's grounds in the third, and within the castle itself in the fourth. A location that was the site of Frankenstein's son's home in two movies is retconned into the site of the original experiments in the next. And the lead characters were recast with abandon, leads like Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney swapping around roles from one film to the next, whereas Lionel Atwill appeared in five consecutive films as a different character each time. There was the pretense of continuity, but it never impeded the films from going their own ways.
Then there are the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films. The first two made by 20th Century Fox in 1939 were set in the Victorian Era, but when Universal took over the series in 1942, they changed the setting to the present day and had Holmes take on Nazi saboteurs and spies in the first few movies, with only an opening title card explaining the timelessness of Holmes as a character.
Even
Star Trek started out this way on film.
The Wrath of Khan reused sets, miniatures, props, and stock footage from TMP for budgetary reasons, but the filmmakers were implicitly ignoring TMP and making their movie as if the previous film had never happened. There were elements of a soft reboot in TNG as well. It was later productions that tied them all together more closely.
