I was thinking about this this morning, specifically with historical movies (but no reason to limit the thread to that). Are there movies that you see as being unofficial sequels to other movies?
What brought this on was I recently watched Braveheart again and I remembered reading an article about a movie being made about Robert the Bruce that wasn’t officially a sequel to Bravehart but would be pick up where Braveheart left off.
Not officially, but The Lion in Winter can be seen as a sequel to Beckett. Peter O’Toole deliberately played the part in The Lion in Winter the same way he had played it in the previous movie.
When I was watching “Mighty Joe Young”(The original), I kept thinking that Robert Armstrong’s character could be seen as an older, wiser carl denhem, so it could be seen as a pseudo-sequel to “King Kong/Son of Kong”.
I’ve heard people claim that High Plains Drifter was based on the idea “What if Gary Cooper’s character in *High Noon * had been killed?”
I have also heard people claim that Soldier was supposed to be set in the same society as Blade Runner.
According to the IMDb, Die Hard is technically a sequel to the 1980 Frank Sinatra movie The First Deadly Sin. Both movies were based on novels by Roderick Thorp. By the way, it also says that Bruce Willis made his movie debut in a walk-on part in the Sinatra flick. Weird.
The screen writer for Solider actually says it’s a “sidequel” to Blade Runner. Both films mention the battle at Tannhauser Gate.
I always thought Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan were in some sense connected. One showing the gruesome reality of war (well at least the opening) and the other showing why it is sometimes necessary.
Enemy of the State is in some sense a sequel to The Conversation, at least in that Gene Hackman is essentially playing the same character twenty-some years later.
In the 1942 Preston Sturges movie Sullivan’s Travels, a movie director named Sullivan really, really wants to make a movie called O Brother Where Art Thou?. He wants to make it as a serious literary film. Then he learns a lesson about the value of comedy. So the Coen Brothers’ *O Brother Where Art Thou? *is kind of the movie that Sullivan might have made after his lesson. It’s not so much a movie within a movie as it is a movie within an *imaginary *movie. That is, Sullivan never makes the movie during Sullivan’s Travels, so it’s not a movie within *that *movie. But if there had been a conventional sequel to ST, in which Sullivan makes his movie, OBWAT? is the movie within that sequel, which was never made.
K?
Although not really a movie sequel per se, Fight Club as a “sequel” to the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes works as a sort of twisted version of the topic’s idea.
Pale Rider. If you consider Clint Easwood’s character to be an older version of The Man With No Name, you will notice that the gunslinger he encounters at the end, bears some resemblance to Lee Van Cleif.
There was an episode of Magnum, P.I. in which the guest stars were an aging detective, and his girlfriend who just got out of prison. The names were changed, but it was essentially a sequel to The Maltese Falcon.
If shared characters makes a sequel, then “Waynes World 2” is a sequel to “Withnail and I” (Ralph Brown plays the same character in both, the drug dealer in Withnail and I, the roadie in Waynes World 2).
I also though “The Matador” could have been a sequel to any number of assassin/secret-agent movies. With Pierce Brosnan’s character being how the amoral womanising globe-troping killer would really be like.
Based on source material The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho can be seen as sequels to Less Than Zero as the original novels share characters. There were plans for the movie of TROA to include a scene of Sean Bateman calling his brother Patrick while Patrick was in the middle of a horrific murder, but the scene was cut.
Coming to America is a sequel to Trading Places, since Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche show up as the Duke Brothers from the earlier movie.
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is connected to The Great McGinty: the governor of the state where Morgan’s Creek is in is the title character of the other film (with his political boss at his side).
Out of Sight is a sequel to Jackie Brown, since Michael Keaton plays Ray Nicholette in both.
I always saw Unforgiven as a sequel to Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti western movies, the character now settled down with kids and worrying about how to pay mortgages on the farm rather than drifting.
And of course Robin & Marian is intended to be a sequel to other Robin Hood pics.
Tears of the Sun was apparently first conceived as a (fourth?) Die Hard sequel.
Double Jeopardy would work as a sequel to The Fugitive and U.S. Marshals, since they all have Tommy Lee Jones playing pretty much the same character doing the same thing. You could imagine that he lost his job as a Marshal and became a Parole Officer between the movies.
Are Chasing Amy, Mallrats and Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back sequels to Clerks? Or are they more just “movies all having characters that exist in the Kevin Smith Universe?”
Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith appear as Jay & Silent Bob in all four, but other actors appear in different roles (most notably the fella who starred as “the clerk” Dante in Clerks) in all of them.
The characters Silent Bob and Jay (with the same actors) also appear in the movie Scream 3, as well as in several TV shows.