IMDb is listing a project currently in post-produstion that they’re (temporarily, I assume) calling "Meet the Fockers Sequel."
But Meet the Fockers was itself a sequel to Meet the Parents. Isn’t this third film actually a second sequel to Meet the Parents, or is it proper to call it a sequel to Meet the Fockers?
Is your aswer different depending on circumstances? For instance, I could see making the argument that The Scorpion King could be considered a sequel to The Mummy Returns.
Discuss. (Though I’m not so much interested in whether you think there should be another Focker movie. That’s for another thread!:))
Dark Forces
Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II
Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
Not entirely without reason, either, IMO… Jedi Knight didn’t have much in common with Dark Forces except for the main character and general setting - while both FPSes, the first was basically a Doom clone and the latter added a lot of extra gameplay features, like third person lightsaber combat, force powers, 3D models, etc. Jedi Outcast was much more similar to Jedi Knight.
Superman Returns drew on specific plot elements from Superman II, and nothing from III or IV.
Most of the Lethal Weapon and Friday the 13th sequels drew on lore that wasn’t in the original installments. And Army of Darkness took its jokey tone from Evil Dead II, not the original.
I’m really scraping bottom with these examples, but most movie franchises really don’t find their voice until the second or third installment; not many 007 movies proceed from Dr. No, but almost all of them proceed from Goldfinger or Thunderball.
Along the lines of the game succession magnusblitz points out, if the movie referenced in the OP actually focused more on characters introduced in Meet the Fockers than on characters from the original, I’d argue it was better referred to as a Fockers sequel than a Meet the Parents sequel. Though every film in a “franchise” is technically, as KneadToKnow points out, a sequel to its immediate predecessor.
I recall that when Rambo III was released my friends and I insisted that it was mistitled – since the succession had been:
First Blood Rambo: First Blood, Part II
The next film should have been called something like: Desert Storm: Rambo II, First Blood, Part III; with each successive film picking up a new title and advancing the previous ones one notch. Sadly, no movie franchise has yet adopted our methodology.
To use an example from the OP, the Mummy series ran like this:
The Mummy (1999) - introduced the current characters The Mummy Returns (2001) - brought the characters from The Mummy back for a sequel and introduced the new character of the Scorpion King. So it’s a standard sequel. The Scorpion King (2002) - Based on the character of the Scorpion King. So it’s a sequel to The Mummy Returns but has no direct connection to The Mummy. The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior (2008) - Based on characters from The Scorpion King so again it’s not really a sequel to either The Mummy or The Mummy Returns. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) - Breaks out of the Scorpion King timeline and goes back to the characters from The Mummy and The Mummy Returns.
Horror films do this too
Nightmare on Elm Street
Nightmare on Elm Street 3 “Dream Warriors”
NOES 4 “The Dream Master”
NOES 5 “The Dream Child”
NOES 6 “Freddy’s Dead”
NOES 7 “New Nightmare”
Freddy Vs. Jason
Friday the 13th also does this, we’re up to what now, F13 part 28; Jason Is Laid Off And Goes On Unemployment?
An excellent example, which occurred to me while I was at dinner and came back to mention.
Also, the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer was, as I understand it, intended by its creators as a sequel to the script Joss Whedon wrote for the movie, rather than the movie that was actually released.