Have no fear,
The man of bronze is here.
Doc Savage,Doc Savage!*
I suspect that Star Wars, for example, was always intended to go onward after the end of “A New Hope”. George clearly made the ending non-final: Darth was alive and well, the Empire had a setback but wasn’t crippled. Luke was not yet a Jedi. However, like many movies, he wrapped it up enough that he didn’t feel like he had to make another movie if it didn’t turn out very lucrative.
Lots of writers and directors do this. They have a few themes and events they want to continue with, but they may not write a script until they’re sure they can get away with making another flick.
Obviously, this makes no sense as I wrote it. It should have been, “…intended to make For Your Eyes Only next, but…”
You know, they made movies before the 60s…
Take the “Andy Hardy” films. Too many to easily count on IMDB. Sometimes as many as 3 a year.
They had to be thinking about sequels while making these.
And that’s just one (very popular) sequence of full length films. There’s lots of earlier stuff that is short by today’s standards but considered “full length” at the time.
That is ok Jabba, you are correct!
At the end of The Spy who loved me, the credits read: "James Bond Will Return in ‘For Your Eyes Only’.
Moonraker was not originally scheduled to be the next Bond film, but because Star Wars was so popular, Broccoli -the producer- decided to make Moonraker first.
Matthew Broderick’s Godzilla ended with a shot of the MSG floor, squared in on a Godzilla egg hatching. I suppose they could’ve been going for the you-never-know effect that ended many an episode of The X-Files, but I don’t give them that much credit.
(Now that I think about it more, I may have the movie wrong. I’m pretty sure it was Madison Square Garden, though.)
I wouldn’t say Spider-Man had a sequel in mind. It did surprisingly well at the box office its first week and a sequel was planned.
As for Star Wars I’d say it stands fairly well on its own. The only truly open-ended part was Vader’s TIE fighter getting blown off course instead of exploding or something, which is something that maybe 10% of average viewers would actually notice.
The end of X2 just kind of amused me. As a fan, it just seemed like a cheesy little thing to tack on the end. They should’ve killed Halle Berry instead.
The ending of the first Mortal Kombat movie just smacked of “we’re making a sequel!”
Similarly, Clerks ended with “Jay and Silent Bob will return in Dogma”. But they returned in Mallrats and Chasing Amy first.
I know a lot of films have an open ending, where the main plot is resolved but at the last minute you see that one more of the monsters survived, or that the evil guy you thought was dead really got away. But for the most part the plot is resolved. So unless the evil guy sets up another conflict instead of just walking away planning for tomorrow night, I think that would count as a stand-alone ending. It leaves room for a sequel, but doesn’t necessarily demand one. I suppose whether a sequel is demanded is subjective, though.
As for the endings of the 2nd film in a trilogy, that doesn’t really count. They didn’t know that Star Wars was going to be a hit, but after its success they could assume that one or two sequels would do well, so making ESB with RotJ in mind isn’t too big a gamble.
Uhhh… it was hard to miss it. They showed a rather distinct shot of Vader in his special Tie correcting his course after it was shot. Then he stabilized it and flew off.
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned movies like Halloween, Friday 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street. When a movie ends and the super tough evil monster isn’t really dead, you can bet a sequel is in the works.
Right. We need to distinguish movies with natural sequels from those where the producers cobble together a sequel (or if they really screwed up, a prequel) when the movie made money. Lucas announced he intended to make 9 movies very early. In fact, in Skywalking, the first biography of him which came out before RotJ, they described some of the stories he wrote as a kid - most of which have the hero rescuing his sister. I conclude that he knew Leia was Luke’s sister from the beginning.
Of course you need to make even the first part of a series a complete movie, unless you are working from a literary source like Lord of the Rings, where everyone knows what is coming.
It’s ironic that the movie I’ve seen in the past few years that has screamed out “sequel” at the end the most is Dungeons and Dragons.
How about Resident Evil, can’t get much more blatant than that, the heroine escapes the Umbrella research lab, makes her way out to the streets of a devistated Racoon City, grabs a shotgun from a crashed cruiser, racks the slide to chamber a shell, as the camera cranes away showing a completely destroyed city…
can’t get much more blatant than that, they even used similar camera angles from the Capcom RE2 game…
I was hoping we’d get here! Contrary to poular belief writer Victor Miller has always said that Jason’s appearance at the end of the first movie was always intended as a dream sequence and not an ‘open ending’.
Most other Friday the 13ths were intended to leave the door open, often in wild directions that subsequent directors and writers couldn’t possibly work with (Jason in space comes to mind).
There were only 2 ‘real’ attempts made to end the franchise. The first was part 4, subtitled “The final chapter” (though it even it had a bit of a leader into another movie, but with a different killer; an idea tried twice that failed twice in the series) and the other attempt to end it was the end of part 8, where Jason regresses into a child. By that point Paramount just wanted out of the franchise altogether (they later sold it to New Line who has done 2 sequels and the highly successful cross-over 'Freddy vs. Jason").
Sometimes when that happens :coughHighlandercough: they go ahead and make a sequel anyaway.
Also, every movie after “Beneath the Planet of the Apes”.
I believe Heston asked them to blow up the planet at the end so they wouldn’t be asking him back for more sequels. The writers found a way around it anyway.
I always thought Silverado ended in such a way that a sequel would happen. It never happened and I, for one, think that was a shame. It’s one of my favourite movies and one of the few Kevin Costner films I actually like.