Imagining unnecessary or inappropriate film sequels used to be an amusing parlour game. “Titanic 2!” you might venture. “Gandhi: The Return!” To prove that studios would sometimes be blinded to taste and decency by commercial necessity, you had only to point to the grim deterioration which is the Jaws franchise: 1975’s iconic original Jaws, the serviceable but creatively empty Jaws 2 (1978), the faddish and best forgotten Jaws 3-D of 1983 and finally the irredeemably dire and slipshod Jaws: The Revenge (1987). Sir Michael Caine, who accepted a role for purely financial reasons, famously said of the last film, “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”
Cinema has changed immeasurably since then. Sequels and franchises are the backbone of Hollywood, and for obvious reasons. They represent reliable intellectual property with an established fan base, and they can provide films which are both new yet familiar. They are, in one sense, an exercise in de-risking. A brand new project can offer few guarantees, but the holders of the purse strings might well be reassured if you can point to the success of a previous effort.
This year sees its fair share of sequels hit the big screen. In February, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two was released to follow 2021’s first instalment; since then Kung Fu Panda 4, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 have poured out of studios. It is only the year’s midway point, however, and we can still look forward to Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Joker: Folie à Deux, Paddington in Peru, Gladiator II, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Mufasa: The Lion King before 2024 is out.
There are many reasons why this parade of recycling, rebooting and replicating can seem dismaying. The most obvious is the implication of a dearth of creativity: it is the plain truth that a fourth Beverly Hills Cop film is not the same kind of artistic endeavour as Christopher Nolan’s magnificent Oppenheimer, or the outrageous, no-holds-barred Saltburn, or Celine Song’s unbearably poignant Past Lives. Whether it is justified or not, anyone who thinks about the history of cinema will suspect that many sequels are attempts to play it safe and wring more reward out of an established concept.
More ominous, perhaps, is the fear that a bad or lazy sequel can in some way diminish the original, tarnishing it by association. This is especially acute when it comes to sequels which appear long after their progenitors have been released and have matured into familiar parts of the cultural landscape. It is axiomatic that nothing can ever be unseen, so the filmgoer is always taking a risk: if a sequel is disappointing or undermines the prototype, that damage is irreversible.
I cannot have been the only person who contemplated Top Gun: Maverick (2022) with profound trepidation. The original film, released when I was almost nine years old and an often-watched staple of my childhood, is genuinely iconic, from Harold Faltermeyer’s synth-drenched soundtrack and the dazzling, adrenalised aerial sequences to Tom Cruise’s defining bravura performance as Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. Surely after an interval of 36 years, with Cruise transformed from a fearless 23-year-old to a veteran of 56, would cast a pall of age and disillusionment over those memories?
Return of ‘The Return….’
In the end Top Gun: Maverick was a triumph. It grossed $1.5 billion at the box office, comfortably the biggest commercial success of Cruise’s career, and it brought audiences back to cinemas after the Covid-19 pandemic. It retained the visual flair, excitement and sheer bombast of the original film, Mark Kermode calling it an “eye-popping blockbuster that, for all its daft macho contrivances, still manages to take your breath away, dammit”. But there was depth, too, Cruise’s hero more vulnerable with age, wounds still raw under the scar tissue of experience. It was not a remake or a replica, but the natural successor to Top Gun, a film utterly of its time which could only have been made in the shadow of the original.
Not every sequel is a happy ending. Basic Instinct was a much better film than many now remember, a slick, stylish, genuinely erotic thriller, but its sequel, released 14 years later, was a flat and ludicrous slog which highlighted the original’s shortcomings and cast a pall over the franchise. Even the director, Michael Caton-Jones, all but disowned it, admitting in an interview: “the experience of making it: it was horrible. And I knew before I started that it wasn’t going to be a particularly good film. Which is a very, very painful thing.”
Sometimes a string of sequels ends up exposing the paucity of the original material. Police Academy (1984) made no claims to high culture, but at a punchy 96 minutes it took a slender plot framework—a new mayor requiring her city’s police training establishment to accept any citizen who chose to apply—and made it a broad, unsophisticated, good-natured comedy vehicle for then-rising star Steve Guttenberg. As a one-off, it would have had a simple, bawdy charm, but six sequels followed over the next decade, the stars gradually falling away until only three, George Gaynes, Michael Winslow and David Graf, remained for the messy, half-hearted and unloved Police Academy: Mission to Moscow. The franchise stands as the epitome of a joke carried too far.
There will always be two schools of thought, leaving aside the straightforward commercial play. The first is that of the greedy child: I loved a film so much I want more of it, I want it to continue, I want to stay in its imaginary world. We have all felt that urge, the sadness when a film or book which strikes a chord comes to an end. It is not inherently bad, nor are we automatically doomed to disappointment. Most Star Wars fans, for example, would agree that The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi took the story of Luke Skywalker and his quest to become a Jedi to a satisfying conclusion, forming a coherent and worthwhile cineastic trilogy. Many regard Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974) as one of the best films ever made, even if the third instalment was a critical flop.
At the same time, there is a somehow ascetic or puritan part of some people’s character which knows that true fulfilment can only come by being circumscribed. We will never enjoy something which is abundant with quite the same treasured piquancy as a rare delicacy. Perhaps the greatest example of this is Fawlty Towers, John Cleese and Connie Booth’s 1970s sitcom masterpiece. It is deservedly etched into comedy legend, but ran for only two series, each of six episodes. A dozen episodes, each half an hour: a mere six hours is all there is. You couldn’t even watch Scorsese’s last two films in that time. Certainly the scripts sparkle with life and sharp wit, and the central quartet—Cleese, Booth, Prunella Scales and Andrew Sachs—each give career-defining performances with the support of a superb cast. But how much of the joy, the veneration, derives from the fact that you know this is a rare and precious resource?
Cinema is culture but the movie business sees profit and loss. Bluntly, making a film today is an exercise in gargantuan expenditure: a front-rank Hollywood feature can easily cost $100 million, and the current official record goes to 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which cost Lucasfilm $447 million to make. The simple corollary of this is that profits, from the box office, licensing, distribution, merchandising and so on, must be equally enormous, which underscores the lure of an established concept with an existing audience.
We like to talk of golden ages of fiercely innovative independent cinema, of the 1970s and Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese, Bogdanovich; or of the early 1990s, of Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Joel and Ethan Coen, Roberto Rodriguez. The grinding expansion of budgets probably does make the true auteur’s job even harder now, but those golden ages had stinkers aplenty, like Zardoz (1974), Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992) or Showgirls (1995). We will soon celebrate the centenary of sound film and it has proved a resilient and inventive medium through a hundred years of challenges.
Sequels are not inherently lazy or unimaginative. Some of the best films ever made have been sequels. But there will always be a temptation to repeat a successful formula again and again, and of course that can squeeze innovation to the margins. This year Furiosa and Bad Boys: Ride or Die have earned well and found favour with many critics. If Axel F, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Gladiator II live up to the strengths of their predecessors, the industry will be able to congratulate on a successful 2024. As audiences, let us make sure we also buy our tickets or pay our subscriptions to see some more ground-breaking features too. As Francis Ford Coppola said, “cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated”. We still haven’t found a replacement.
Image top – AI impression of a space meets ancient Rome inspired sequel
