Sequels that took big risks

Cafe Society
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I was watching Back to the Future II again today and it was making me think how easy it is to forget just how risky a movie it was. They could have played it safe and just had an adventure in the future that was telegraphed by the end of the first one and called it a day but instead they used the future sequence as a springboard for what is probably one of the most complicated plots in a mainstream movie.

Gremlins 2 is another one. Rather than just do something easy like have another Gremlins outbreak but somewhere where the stakes are higher like in New York City for example, they decided to just go insane and go the dark comedy route and rip the previous, beloved, movie to shreds. Love it or hate it, you have to admire their bravery.

Any other sequels that went out on a limb (for good or for ill)?

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Good choices. Both took some serious risks.

I’d say The Chronicles of Riddick. It’s a sequel to Pitch Black, but they did not just churn out another “stuck on a planet” plot. They went big…and failed at the box office.

Still, the third one comes out soon enough, anyway, so it must have caught some attention.

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Babe: pig in the city was very risky.

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Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior was very different from the original. They took a small film that focused on a solitary man out for revenge and amped it up into a big production. And the original wasn’t really all that well known. Spending all those bucks and changing major theme elements was quite risky, IMO.

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And is absolutely fantastic, surreal and absurd. I can’t recommend it enough.

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Are we restricting to movies? In video games, it seems like more the rule than the exception that the second in a series is completely different from all the rest. Just look at Zelda, or Super Mario Bros.

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One case where they didn’t take the risk was in RoboCop. The originally proposed sequel would have been vastly different from finally appeared, set much farther in the future. The writers dropped out because of a writer’s strike. Frank Miller then wrote a very different script, but it was decided to be not filmable, so the existing script was cobbled together as much more conventional sequel. I suspect either of the un-filmed scripts would have been a lot more interesting.

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Highlander II?

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Terminator 2

hiring an unknwon kid for a major role
trying out the new CGI tech
spending a lot of money

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Well, if they’d had someone other than Schwarzenegger in it, I’d agree, but once he signed on, the risk factor dropped hugely, especially since by then he’d established himself as an action-movie hero rather than villain, with his role in T2 adjusted accordingly.

I daresay On Her Majesty’s Secret Service took a major risk just in the recasting of the main character, and with an unknown to boot.

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Star Trek 2: The Death of Spock

I don’t know but I’ve been told, in the making of Star Wars V and VI, Lucas nearly went completely broke each time (and then end up a multi-mega-millionaire). It wasn’t until after he made the three movies (and a few others along the way) that he was able to build ILM and LucasArts into something that could absorb the big-budget movie costs without a staggering risk involved.

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Both of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead sequels took a big chance by going for slapstick comedy, after the original had become a hit among the hardcore horror-loving crowd.

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Dawn of The Dead? :confused:

“Night of the Living Dead”, wasn’t all that well received at the time, was it?

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Return to Oz. Unfortunately, the dark version didn’t catch on, even though it was an excellent film.

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Edit: Oh man, great minds think alike! I started my post earlier, but went to fix dinner and gather laundry. Really! I should have previewed though.

Yes! I agree with both posts.

Along the same lines, Return To Oz was a huge risk.

It was a “sequel” to a well-loved film (although it really wasn’t a sequel but rather an offshoot of the books)

It featured an unknown lead (Fairuza Balk, a perfect Dorothy)

It was directed by a first-time director (although that was Walter Murch, who was a highly respected Editor and Sound Engineer and who’d worked with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola), and

According to IMDB, had a $25 million budget.

Like the dark and visionary Babe: Pig In The City, it tanked. At least B:PITC had some major critics in its corner, such as Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, who picked it as his Best Film of 1998. RTO did not. Those same two, and seemingly everyone else, savaged Return To Oz because it dared, DARED, to depict events after those of The Wizard of Oz, and because it dared, DARED, to be dark and scary and not light and bright and a musicalhappymovie. I will never forgive them for that. They (not just them, but they were most important) killed a movie that deserved better. They killed Walter Murch’s chances of giving us more amazing films because he never directed again.

At least RTO has quite a cult following now, from those who discovered it on video. B:PITC doesn’t seem to have quite the same cult following. I don’t want either movie to be forgotten. A few weeks ago a local theater that shows late night movies several times a week chose Return To Oz to feature on Friday and Saturday night. It was great seeing it again on the big screen, even though it was obviously video (I saw RTO in the theater several times when it was first released, there are things that don’t come through on video). I wish they would show B:PITC too.

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Ya know, maybe it’s because I grew up on scifi like Star Trek but I’ve never understood the whole ‘Back to the Future II was too confusing’ argument. It wasn’t confusing at all. And it was a truly great sequel. Amplified the adventure, time travel & action successfully!

Gremlins 2 I’d have to disagree. That movie wasn’t so much a risk as it was a ridiculous, unfocused, badly written, badly conceived, all-flash-and-no-substance mess! When the one gremlin started talking like Tony Randall and doing a talk show I just went WTF?!?

Again, I’d say they took way WAY too much of a risk in thinking that Vin Diesel could carry the sequel. He was great in the first one, but the stars of Pitch Black were Rahda Mitchell and, most importantly, the cool space monsters! Riddick on some fundamental religious planet with political intrigue?! Ah, no.

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“Night of the Living Dead” was considered a cult classic by the time Romero made Dawn. It had been critically and morally blasted by a then-unknown Roger Ebert in the pages of Reader’s Digest, but that just raised its countercultural appeal. “Dawn of the Dead” was great, but I don’t think I’d call it risky. They had a lot more money behind it (Night of the Living dead really was made on a shoestring) and a built-in audience. It was immediately successful.

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The OP probably just wants movies, but if we include other media… Beaumarchais’ ***The Marriage of Figaro ***takes a big chance in showing Count Almaviva and Rosina UNHAPPILY married, years after the happy ending we saw in The Barber of Seville.

At the end of Barber, the dashing, cunning count has swept the sweet Rosina off her feet… but at the start of ***Marriage, ***he’s a bored, philandering husband and she’s a sad, lonely lonely wife who must learn to be cunning in her own right t osave her marriage.

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Oooooh, that was one odd and bold sequel. I give them major props on that one.

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Well, that was sort of the point of Gremlins 2. I’d say it was a big risk, because they could have done a straight-up sequel, and made another “creature feature” like it’s competitor/knock-off, Critters.

But even by the time Gremlins 2 was being made, the first Gremlins was already looked back on as being campy horror, so whoever was in charge of the sequel took that idea and made a giant, 90-minute meta-joke about campy horror movies.

It has a lot of things you typically see in campy, creature movie sequels being lampooned:
The monsters “mutating” into something worse.
The monsters getting “smarter.”
“Bigger stakes”/“bigger city.”
Etc…

Plus, Phoebe Cates character parodying her own Christmas speech from the first movie over and over again was hilarious. That reason alone makes the movie worth watching. :smiley: