Sequels, Remakes, and Reboots Part III: Sequels

Of the three things being discussed in this series, sequels are generally speaking the hardest to come to a vague defense of.  And yet, they've been around for decades to say nothing of centuries. The biggest argument against them is that they seem to be nothing more than a money grab. But, truth to tell, one can say that of almost any commercial endeavor, especially in regards to movies. Movies are a business, after all, something most people forget.

While we like to think of sequels as being of relatively recent vintage, they really aren't. They stretch back to at least the 1910s. But back then, nobody just numbered the films. One of the early examples of a sequel comes, fittingly enough, from the serial format. The first serial was done in 1912, called What Happened to Mary?. It was a success--as well as being one of the early movie tie-ins where a novelization was done in serial format in the newspapers--and inspired a second serial called Who Will Marry Mary?. Admittedly, neither one of those sounds like an edge of your seat cliffhanger, but then again, it took a couple of years for the serial format to really develop into that. That wasn't the only serial from the era to gain a sequel. 1916's Pearl White thriller The Exploits of Elaine got one called The Romance of Elaine.

Of course, I'm just speaking cinematically. You can take it back a lot farther than 1913. In fact, you can take the numbered sequel routine back to a guy whose name may or may not have actually been William Shakespeare. Seems he did a few Part 1 and Part 2 type plays back in the day. In fact, you can take it father back than that to the Greeks, with the Thebes plays by Sophocles and The Illiad and The Odyssey. "Yes, but those are classics" you may be saying. They're classics now, but they were pop entertainment--in particular Shakespeare's work--in their day.

Sequels proliferated in novel format once the printing press was invented. Accordingly, a number of said sequels were essentially repeats of the novel that preceded them. Sound familiar? This was done mostly to assert the author's ownership over the properties.

The point is, this sort of thing has literally gone on for centuries and isn't likely to change any time soon.

Up until about the 1970s, however, sequels--or at least movie sequels--tried to tell somewhat different stories and have completely different titles. The sequel to the 1931 Frankenstein wasn't called Frankenstein 2, it was called The Bride of Frankenstein. While some of the nuts and bolts of the story were similar, it also wasn't a direct repeat of the first movie, either. Not even serials told the same exact story or numbered their sequels.

There were a couple of examples of sequels being numbered prior to the 1970s--Quatermass 2 from 1957 being possibly the earliest example--but starting in that decade, the floodgates started to open. While both The Godfather Part II and The French Connection II were both considered better than their respective first movies, they also seemed to help get the trend of numbering started. The Exorcist II, Rocky II and Jaws 2 followed by the end of the decade. Then came the 1980s.

For reasons that film historians will be debating 100 years from now, if they're not already debating it, the sequel concept really caught fire in the 80s. It mostly seems to have started off with the slasher film. 1981 brought us both Halloween II and Friday the 13th Part 2, both of which were just sucessful enough for the studios to ensure that we'd be spending much of the decade watching their spawn. Sequel after sequel to those and other horror franchises followed and so long as they made a profit, they kept getting made. Comedies--most notably raunchy juvenile comedies like Porky's and Meatballs started getting in on the act as did action movies. The single biggest problem with a large number of these is the fact that they really did simply repeat the first movie--and nowhere near as well. I enjoyed the first two Police Academy films when I was a teenager but quickly abandoned the series after the third film when I realized that not only did it suck, but it simply repeated all the jokes in the first two. Mind you, this is coming from someone who didn't always have the greatest of taste in movies when he was a teenager.

The trend was so bad by 1983 that Siskel and Ebert's "Worst of the Year" show for that year was dedicated to nothing but sequels. I have to admit, there were some pretty wretched sequels unleashed on the public that year. They highlighted such rotten sequels as The Sting II, Staying Alive--the sequel to Saturday Night Fever and the only film on the list of sequels to not have a number--, Smokey and the Bandit 3, Jaws 3-D (which I kinda like even though it is a bad movie), and Amityville 3-D. At the end of the show, they implored audiences to not watch any sequels unless they said so.

I will be fair to the 80s, however. There were some sequels that were very good in that decade, mostly in the science fiction genre. I'm not sure what it is about science fiction, but the sequels to sci-fi movies are rarely dumb repeats. The Star Wars and Star Trek sequels are all fairly decent. Even the "bad" entries in those series are better than most comedy and slasher sequels. I'm sorry, but I'd rather watch the much hated Star Trek V: The Final Frontier than the same numbered Nightmare on Elm Street or Police Academy movies. None of the 80s Indiana Jones movies--even the much maligned Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom--are bad movies either. Continuing with the sci-fi theme, Aliens was also an excellent sequel. We just won't talk about the 90s Alien movies.

Part of the problem, which again goes back to the 70s, is that following the law of diminishing returns, sequels got lower and lower budgets as the series went on. The original Planet of the Apes series is a prime example of this. The excellent make up jobs on all of the apes in the first film gave way to bad Halloween masks in later entries. The diminishing budgets may not be as evident in comedies like the Revenge of the Nerds series, but it comes up front and center in an effects heavy series like Superman. The budget and effects for the notorious Supergirl and Superman IV were so bad that they killed the series until the 2000s.

Lately, however, that doesn't necessarily follow. Movies are trying to put more money into the sequel, to make it bigger and more spectacular than the film that came before. Sometimes that pays off. A fairly surprising source of good sequels nowadays seems to be in the comic book genre. With the exceptions of a few notable missteps like X-Men III--a movie I truly regret seeing--the comic book genre has really stepped up. The latest Thor and Iron Man movies were, if not better than their predecessors, at least as good as. Spider-Man 2 and X2 were also better sequels. Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy got better as it went along.  In the coming months we'll have sequels to both Captain America and X-Men that both look like they should be good. Again, like Sci-Fi movies, the thing that these newer comic book movies have going for them is their ability to tell different stories in each film. That helps make the movies at least seem fresher, or at the very least, not make us think "didn't we see this story already?".

Of course, there's a lot of other sequels coming this summer and even more in 2015. The thing is, some of them will be good. They certainly have the capacity and lately haven't been too bad at it. Well, except for comedy sequels. They still haven't figured out that idea. Other sequels--like the forthcoming Dolphin Tail 2--will make us wonder why in God's name a sequel was necessary. Others still just may make us hate humanity for their existence.

So, at the end of the day, should you listen to Siskel & Ebert's advice from 30 years ago? No sequels unless directly told otherwise. Not necessarily. I still watch sequels and in a few weeks will be happily dropping money to see the second Captain America. I'm fairly sure it will make a mint, too. So long as sequels make money, sequels get made no matter how good, bad, or indifferent. That's the way it's always been, that's the way it is, and that's the way it's always going to be.