I love Bad Santa and Shakespeare in Love, but no sequel to either of those is necessary or even desirable. The characters have developed; the stories are over. Write something new, damn it! The same is true for most of the other moveis on that list.
But that’s just me. What movies or novels should never be sequeled, and why?
Before anybody complains, I am perfectly okay with listing stories that already have sequels if the poster thinks making a sequel was fundamentally a bad idea, such as those horrid follow-ups to Casablanca and Gone With the Wind.
I actually had blocked the memory that someone had done a sequel to GWTW. I repudiate thee, Alexandra Ripley!
I hear that Stephen King is working on a sequel to The Shining (his best work, IMO). And Og help me, I know that I’ll read it and that he’ll fuck it up and I’ll be sad.
The Phantom of the Opera. I saw the sequel, Love Never Dies, while in London and the plot is just idiotic. The characters barely resemble how they were in the original, and they really have to strain the bounds of credibility to shoehorn in plot points that really make no sense considering how the first one ended.
I DESPISE all the Jane Austen sequels. First off, Mr. Darcy should never have a throbbing manhood. There is no SEX in Austen - well, some implied sex…but only implied. Secondly, very few people can manage her voice, what I’ve read at them (they are often given to me as hand me downs) tend to be horribly written. But more importantly, for these characters, their engagements are their happy endings.
And on a related point, **True Grit ** was and is perfect in the original form. This blasphemous remake currently being advertised is a Thing Which Should Not Be.
Generally, I’d agree with you. But this remake is from the Coen Brothers. So based on past performance, I’ll cut them some slack and wait to see how it works out.
I think one could be a really good followup to D9, but it would be really hard to do on film. You’d need to focus on humanity’s reaction to a fleet of ships arriving from the prawn homeworld, commanded by a ruling caste that’s both able to communicate effectively with human authorities, and massively pissed off at how we’ve been treating the ones stranded on Earth. Maybe a novel would work, but a film would just wind up being another alien invasion flick.
I enjoyed most of Battlestar Galactica (not the finale). The way the series ended it’s pretty much impossible to go any kind of sequel that’s both watchable and recongizable as part of the franchise (which is way they most rely on prequels to keep the franchise alive).
There are 4 scenarios for a sequel. The first is to follow the survivors of the Fleet on Earth now that they’ve abandoned all of their technology and culture in exchange for Stone Age savagery. They could easily all end up dying. Even Hera only needs to live long enough to be raped in her teens and die in childbirth. Or you could follow the surviving Ones, Fours, and Fives as they all die off old age or suicide (amusing themselves with group sex in the interim). Or follow the newly freed Centurions as the go off in their baseship to find there own civilization. Finally you could set a series in our own future after we’ve finally rediscovered (after 150K+ yrs)how to make our own robotic slaves and had them rebel.