I understand the need for Hollywood to generate sequels because movie making is so expensive and films that have a built in audience are safer. However I hate it when a sequel hurts the original good movie. Not in that the sequel is bad that it makes you dislike that franchise but when the sequels shows you that something you liked about the first one or the purpose of the first one is no more.
For instance the Star Wars prequels were awful but with the exception of the midicholorians did not significantly affect anything in the original trilogy. However, the Force Awakens while a decent film did ruin the original trilogy. It turns out that all the fighting and action of the original trilogy was for naught as the Force Awakens shows us that after Return of the Jedi, instead of the Republic being restored and all the characters being happy together, Leia and Han divorce, Luke trains the next Darth Vader and then runs away, while the Galactic empire is replace by an even worse government that builds even bigger planet destroying weapon. If none of the stuff in the original trilogy had happened the galaxy would not have been appreciably worse off.
Other examples of this are Karate Kid 2 where the girl Daniel spends the first movie falling in love with dumps him for a soccer player offscreen. In Oceans 12 they spend the movie trying to replace the money they stole from the evil tycoon in Oceans 11 with interest. In Highlander 2 the immortals are revealed just to be aliens on the run.
Football. American football. thumps chest and grunts
Well, how about a sequel that ruins a sequel? Aliens 3 immediately kills off the cute little girl who was rescued in Aliens. And the aliens survive. So, basically, in Aliens, an entire marine squad gets wiped out, they nuke the site from orbit and still manage not to be sure, and no one lives happily ever after.
“Ruin the original” is a bit strong, I’ll go with “deserve to be ignored.”
I was going to mention everything after Aliens. (In fact, I’ve only actually watched the first 2 after Aliens. I have no interest in even trying any of the other franchise films.)
All the Psycho sequels, of course.
Well, I don’t think a sequel could or** should** ever ruin the original movie. The original will always stand on it’s own and can be viewed over and over again and enjoyed just the same. You can say that a sequel could ruin a linear story, if you choose to consider all the films (original and sequels) as one long story.
For example, for me, while I enjoy the *Back to the Future *trilogy of films, the addition of having the disastrous reaction that occurs when someone calls Marty a chicken, which becomes a huge plot point in both 2 & 3, always bothered me.
Sure, it didn’t ruin my enjoyment of BTTF but whenever a large addition like this occurs in a sequel, one that was never brought up in the original, it sure ruins the sequels a bit for me.
I am rather tired of this meme. The prequels were Ok, not awful. By any measure they did well and rated well.
The Directors cut fixed that weird idea.
I think that by almost any possible standard, The Phantom Menace was a very, very, very, very bad movie. Attack of the Clones was merely pretty darn bad. Revenge of the Sith rose all the way to the level of “meh.”
Mind a book example, too? The sequels to Ringworld ruin the original, because they firmly establish it as being in the same continuity as Protector, and the original makes no sense whatsoever in that continuity. OK, so Protector itself doesn’t make much sense in its own continuity, but at least when it’s off by itself, you can just ignore it, without trashing one of the most epic novels of science fiction.
The Mask 2
The Ringworld sequels aren’t very good, but I really like the more recent prequel series.
57% Rotten Tomatoes- so not rotten. Standard one.
$1.027 billion USD- so not rotten. Standard 2.
Nominated for three Academy Awards- so not rotten. Standard 3.
- “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”-* rotten. Standard 4.
I dont know if ". “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” being a “standard” is something we can all agree upon.
Horrible film, but the original is not ruined by it.
2001: A Space Odyssey achieved it’s legendary status in large part because of the questions it left unanswered. 2010: The Year We Make Contact is a good movie, but the answers it provided were never as interesting as the questions had been.
All for technical categories, not acting or writing categories–Best Sound Editing, Best Visual Effects, and Best Sound Mixing–and it lost all three. Meanwhile, it was nominated for six Razzies categories (Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, Worst Supporting Actor, Worst Supporting Actress, and Worst Screen Couple) and won the Worst Supporting Actor.
Much as I hate to disagree about an SF movie with a Doper named Robot Arm, I think 2010 is an unjustly maligned movie. I DO think it could be improved 100% by removing all of Roy Scheider’s voice-overs. That would restore some of the mystery RA desires, as well.
I said it was good. I just don’t think it was as good as it needed to be to follow 2001.
I was thinking of Dr. Chandra’s explanation of why HAL killed the four astronauts on the original Discovery mission. That part is not done in voice-over.
2010 also suffers from Robot Arm’s Law of the Undermined Sci-Fi Badass; the tendency of science fiction films to create cool villains, who then become popular, and must then be turned into good guys in the sequels.[sup]*[/sup]
- Little-known fact, but in the Super Deluxe Extra Crispy Special Edition of Return of the Jedi, Boba Fett escapes from the Sarlacc and rescues a puppy.
1 - Rotten Tomatoes has it as a rotten movie in aggregate, that’s what the green splat means. Shitty movie.
2 - LOL. Tell me how great the Transformers movies are. Shitty movie.
3 - All technical, and it didn’t win. Also LOL. Shitty movie.
57% is just about average. 60% would make it “Fresh”. I’d say 57% is “OK”.
Box Office is a measurable standard, whilst “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”- is not.
Many films dont even get one nod.
This is the one I first thought of. Totally agree.
I’m not seeing exactly how? Yah, the novels are somewhat contrived and sketchy. The characters deduce a lot of things without adequate evidence or reasoning. Funny how all of their guesses turn out to be correct…except when a later book contradicts what they thought they knew…and they guess that correctly too…
But I don’t get how the Protector element, specifically, breaks the series?
Those were good! I like the way the Puppeteers got their necks caught in their own trap: they don’t dare tell humanity about their human clients…and they don’t dare not tell!
(Although I was a bit chuffed by “The Fate of Worlds” which is supposed to be a Ringworld novel…and is most notable for the Ringworld’s absence.)