Discussion: Sequels

So I will add one 'vote' to 'The Fellowship of the Ring' and to 'The Hustler'. Is that OK?

I don't think I quite understood that I was voting for anything. I merely wanted to lay out some sequels that continued or improved upon the quality of the movie before it. An example: I didn't mean to say that Aliens is better than Alien. They are two great movies in two very different styles. Aliens was able to re-imagine and expand the narrative world that Alien existed in. I think it is problematic to measure the two films directly against each other.

By the same token I'm not saying that Toy Story 2 is better than Toy Story (although it very well might be) but that the sequel contributed to and extended the narrative of the first movie. Let's just say that the sequels that I rattled off had to be at least 90% as good as the preceeding movie. Of course this means that Ernest Scared Stupid as well as Ernest in the Army belong on the list. (What is 90% of zero?) For those of you wondering what movies preceeded ESS and EitA they are: Ernest goes to Jail and Ernest goes to Africa... and it's time to admit that you have a problem.

Obviously I would choose The Muppet Movie over all other... err, muppet movies. And I would choose the dark Muppet Treasure Island over a grim The Muppet Christmas Carol in their classic literature series. The Muppets Take Manhattan was a return to form after an uneven effort in The Great Muppet Caper, in spite of the fact that it gave us the excremental Muppet Babies.

Making a successful sequel is extraordinarily difficult. In spite of the fact that the budget is usually larger it is tough enough to capture movie magic, let alone recapture it. I understand the lure of the "built in" audience but it is a key part of the indictment against Hollywood that studios are willing to spend more money on a sequel than they did on the original with the foreknowledge that the audience will almost always be smaller. It is a sign that any kind of insurance of a return on their money (not matter how small) will get a movie made. Especially if it is targetted to adolescent males.

Which reminds me: X-2 / X-Men.

Bad sequels are pretty much what I expect from big media corporations but the fact that so many self-labelled artists are sucked into this trap is discouraging. A poorly done sequel, no matter how profitable, isn't just bad in its own right but it will often take the shine off of the original. George Lucas is just pissing down his own legacy at this point. I just tried to list some sequels that resisted the law of gravity better than most.

Isn't it odd that every even numbered Star Trek movie seems better than the movie that comes before it?