I’m curious what you think that nitpick was.
Possibly, “why did the DeathStar have a big design fault so that it could be destroyed by a single shot from a one man fighter?”
In the Narnia books, The Magician’s Nephew was written 6th out of 7 books, but is chronologically set first. It’s my favourite of the books, and it’s a worthy prequel, It provides explanations for a number of weird details in the first book, such as why there is a lamp-post in the middle of the forest. I wonder if this was a back-story Lewis had thought out when he wrote the first book, or if it was a retcon.
In a rare example of a prequel being called the “Best of the series”, the video game “Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater” is often cited as being the best game of the series. I think it accomplishes this with two very important things, first it’s a prequel that done from the viewpoint of the bad guy in the series and shows why exactly he became a bad guy, it’s not just rehashing the same old formula of prequels where it’s the exact same cast of protagonists just all slightly younger. Second it throws out much of the technobabble and constant multi-layered conspiracies that made up the bulk of the other Metal Gear Solid games and instead just focused on a single core story (with the remaining rest of that stuff being pushed way into the background)
If John Knoll is a ‘fanboy’ every writer in the world is too.
(full disclosure I use to work with him)
And I agree that it’s an example of a “good prequel.”
Who?
John Knoll, the ILM employee who pitched the story for Rogue One, and has the writing credits.
He was the VFX supervisor or animator for small films like The Hunt for Red October, The Abyss, and Avatar.
The OP specifically asks about prequels in cinema. The Hobbit movies are prequels to the Lord of the Rings movies, but the The Hobbit as a book is not a prequel, since it was published first. So I don’t think that the fact that Vito’s backstory is in the novel disqualifies Godfather II as a prequel. They could have made it just a sequel by continuing Michael’s story (material which is not in the book).
Okay, thanks for sharing.
Battlestar Galactica improved the original show quite a bit
The recent Planet of the Apes are cinematic reboots that work really well.
I forgot to add that John Knoll and his brother Thomas are the original programmers for a program called Photoshop that some posters may have used at some point.
Some great replies, thanks. I will happily concede Godfather II and Rogue One as exceptions in my working theory. Maybe because they fill in bits of the story, but don’t really contradict other facts/relationships in the ‘main’ series? I honestly don’t know. Haven’t seen GFII in forever, and my best summation of R1 is that it ‘felt like Star Wars.’ The weakest points in that film, to me, were when they shoehorned in OT characters and references like the two dudes from the Mos Eisley cantina.
Not sure how helpful the TV citations are here, since they are, to me, fundamentally different media with different storytelling conventions. But, I had been dubious of them as well, so maybe I’ll give them a second look!
I’m not sure whether it counts, but just to put it out there: as far as I can tell, the reviews for Batman Vs Superman boiled down to “yeah, it wasn’t great; but, wow, Wonder Woman, she was the highlight of the movie.”
And cue the better-received Wonder Woman movie, explaining who she is and how she got that way — and set decades prior, against the backdrop of WWI.
Among the reasons that those work as prequels for me are that while Saul & Mike were interesting characters, I was never watching BB wondering “how did Saul become the man he is today?” And BB never told me - so I don’t feel like I’m watching a story I already know (or one that I’ve already filled in enough of the blanks of) even though I’ve seen the ending.
For a lot of prequels do the opposite - “find out exactly what happened when Pat met Chris!” Well, I know that Pat & Chris met, and I know that they were friends, I know that they had an argument, and I know what the argument was about because that was central to the conflict in the story that I’ve already seen. I don’t really care what color shirts they were wearing.
I think that the prequel Monsters University does help the story of Monsters, Inc.
How can they not be? They’re both based on C.S. Forester’s novels, and the ones that the A&E series was based on are definitely in the same continuity/universe as the earlier Gregory Peck movie. I don’t think that A&E intended their series to be watched before watching the Peck film, but I don’t think that’s relevant.
If they had made a series based on Forester’s “disowned” Hornblower stories – the ones that don’t fit in with the basic Hornblower universe (and which weren’t reprinted until well after Forester’s death – “The Hand of Destiny”, “Hornblower and the Charitable Offering”, and “Hornblower and His Majesty”), then I’d view THAT as a Hornblower series that wasn’t a prequel.
Temple of Doom is a prequel, and it’s great.
They are two different adaptations of the same source material. Each of therm adapt the source in different ways. Adaptations are rarely 100% faithful, adding details, omitting others, merging characters, changing the ending, etc. Different adaptations will make different changes, and thus are not “in the same continuity.”
Would you consider *Batman Begins *as a prequel to the 1989 *Batman *movie?
A prequel’s aim shouldn’t be about improving a story that already exists, it should really be about telling a new story in the same world. If it adds detail, fine, but that should be a tertiary goal at best.
I think those making prequels, and some cynics view of prequels do not align. If an audience has some expectation of worth being added to the original story and it doesn’t provide any, whose fault is that? The makers had no intention of doing that, they didn’t provide any, so what they’re really doing, a whole new story, is not being fairly judged.
The Batman and Hulk adaptations aren’t relevant. There are vast changes from the source material, which is actually a vast, inconsistent mass of comic material.
The Hornblower books, on the other hand, are fixed and consistent*, and the changes made between the source and the final film aren’t all that large. You could very easily read the A&E series as the first part of what became the Peck film.
The Batman films, on the other hand, are grossly inconsistent in tome and timelines. So are the Hulk films.
It’s often the case that films from different companies can fit together well, often by design. The Ray Harryhausen Mysterious Island can be read as the sequel to the Disney 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – they copied the design of the Nautilus surprisingly closely (although not exactly) from the earlier film, despite the fact that the design is grossly at odds with the description in Verne’s book. Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island is, of course, a sequel to 20,000 Leagues.
Is the movie Silence of the Lambs a sequel to the movie Manhunter? I’d say it was, since both are based on books that are in a series, despite the fact that the look and the mood changed with the different directors and production companies, and they even changed the spelling of Lector’s name. The later film Red Dragon is obviously intended as a prequel to Silence of the Lambs, and has trhe same look and feel (and actor and spelling), but it doesn’t dethrone Manhunter.