What are the best and worst prequels? This question covers novels, narrative poetry, TV shows, movies, comic books, and any other narrative fiction works. For the purpose of this question, a prequel is a prequel regardless of whether or not the author intended all along that the prequel would be made eventually or if they were convinced to write the prequel later based on feedback from fans or publishers or for some other reason, as long as the prequel was completed after the original work.
If the prequel was created by a different author or (for works with multiple authors) by a significantly different group of people, it counts if the prequel was authorized by the relevant copyright or trademark authors. A prequel created by a completely different person or group without any connection with the original author or the owner of the franchise doesn’t count, such as the prequel to Macbeth that your little sister wrote while drunk, or an unauthorized film of the life of Harry Potter’s grandparents that some fraternity did.
In terms of movies I can’t think of a better prequel than X-Men: First Class. It added backstory that enhanced the original films all while being an enteraining stand alone story, you can’t get much better than that.
It is, but it sucks. Which makes sense if you’re nominating it for the worst, but I don’t think it’s bad enough to be the worst, given the Star Wars prequels.
C.S. Forester started out his Horatio Hornblower novels with a trilogy set in his mid-career. He later went back and wrote about his earlier career, starting as Midshipman, and his later career, going to Commodore, Lord, Admiral, and Admiral of the Fleet. If he had enough time, I’m sure he would have taken him all the way to God. Both the prequels and the sequels feature a much more thought-out and better-written set of books than the original three.
It’s a little bit of both. They changed the continuity around, but it features elements of the originals (Magnetos origin, Logan). I think “Re-quel” is the best way to describe it.
I don’t have much to add to the best list but I will second X-Men: First Class and Temple of Doom. For the worst list however.
Alien vs. Predator. I still don’t know how they fucked this up so badly. Why did they screw with the xenomorphs so much? Why did they decide to water it down to a PG-13 rating? Why did they feel the need to make it about Mayan conspiracy theories?
The Exorcist prequels, either of them. These suffer from the same things all of the other Exorcist sequels suffer from, they’re both boring and entirely incomprehensible.
I’m rather fond of The Phoenix Guards, a Steven Brust story that was set in the distant past of his earlier series and told in the style of The Three Musketeers.
Asimov’s Foundation prequels were all pretty dire.
“Red Dragon” wasn’t a prequel. It was Harris’ first book featuring Hannibal Lector (and was made into the movie Manhunter before it was remade as Red Dragon with Hopkins as Lector)
Yep, the fact that Xavier gets paralyzed as a young man pretty much broke any continuity with the other movies, where we see him walking as a C~45 year old in X3.
Worst: Well, the Star Wars ones.
Best: Casino Roylae(Daniel Craig) if you consider it a prequel. Again, it’s more of a reboot.
There’s a pretty wide field of contenders for “worst prequel,” with the Phantom Menace probably way ahead of the pack.
For “best prequel”, The Godfather Part II is probably the obvious answer, but I think my vote goes to Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Great motion capture work on Caesar by Mister Motion Capture himself, Andy Serkis. Focusing on the human world on the brink of turning into an ape world helped it avoid some of the silliness of the originals, the same silliness that Tim Burton tried to embrace with… suboptimal results.
Pretty sure Rise is a flat out reboot. The later sequels of the original series are actually prequels, its been a while since I’ve watched them but I’m pretty sure they don’t jive with the new one.
I can respect that. Unless you’re one of those people who think you should read the books in chronological order, starting with The Magician’s Nephew. Then you’re dead to me.
Well, eliminating X3 would take out some of the inconsistencies, including Xavier and Magneto recruiting mutants together as middle-aged men (i.e. portrayed by Stewart and McKellan) with Xavier ambulatory.
Left unresolved, though, is the issue from the first film of Magneto having helped Xavier build the large sphere-room Cerebro under Xavier’s mansion (confirmed somewhat by how readily he reconfigures Stryker’s copy in X2), and that Hank McCoy appears in his non-blue form.