In one of the Airplane movies, there is shown a movie poster with a shirtless, bearded old man wearing boxing gloves: “Rocky XXXVIII”.
I’d try to do the X-Men series, but that way lies madness.
I once went to a scifi convention, and each day a board was put up telling what movies and videos would be shown that day. On the last day of the convention there was a “schedule” for the day after the convention ended, with goofy titles. One was “Star Wars 26-The Empire Goes Hawaiian”
I don’t know whether numbered sequels are less common nowadays than they used to be. But if they are, one WAG is that, nowadays, they’re not as necessary, since anyone who has trouble keeping track of movie order can easily look that information up online.
I was almost going to reference Rocky 5000 myself, but thought better of it.
Sillier than The Neverending Story 2?
What really need is Breakin’ 3: Digital Jubilee
Yeah, I would agree with that. Unless it’s a consistently successful franchise like Toy Story or Fast and the Furious, just tacking a number at the end looks like a cash grab.
People are much more likely to see the next “Part” (Dune), “Chapter” (John Wick), “Episode” (Star Wars), or “Volume” (Guardians of the Galaxy) of a complete story than some random new tale involving familiar characters.
I think numbers work in the case of Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, as it kind of reflects Tony Starks particular cheesy personality style. Notice how every other Marvel franchise gets full non-numbered titles (Thor: Ragnarok, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Spider Man: No Way Home, etc).
The other exception being the Guardians of the Galaxy films which are “Vol n”, evoking 80s style mix tape labels.
Dropo beat me to Quatermass 2, so I’ll just mention that there were silent movies with ordinal numbers attached to them even before that.
As for why movies sometime drop the number, I’d like to suggest – in all seriousness – that the first one to deliberately do this was the Jaws series, and that they named the fourth movie Jaws – The Revenge instead of Jaws IV because they didn’t want to dredge up memories of Jaws-3D (Even though the *Friday the 13th * had no problems continuing on with IV right after their 3D entry. Jaws probably thought they were too classy for that.)
James Cameron had already made a non-ordinal sequel title the year before with Aliens instead of Alien 2, but they got right back into the swing of things with Alien 3 before abandoning the numbers for Alien: Resurrection.
Any Which Way You Can, the sequel to Every Which Way But Loose, came out in 1980.
Then you have the iPhone:
iPhone
iPhone 3G
iPhone 4
If You Don’t Stop It . . . You’ll Go Blind!!! came out in 1975, followed by
Can I Do It . . 'Til I Need Glasses? in 1977.
Oh, there have been sequels with non-numbered titles for a long time – The Pink Panther was followed by A Shot in the Dark. None of the Bond movies have numbers. The Robe had Demetrius and the Gladiators as a sequel.
My point was about almost copying the original title but not have a numeral. Not only Alien and Aliens, but Predator and Predators. The Fast and Furious series has been trying to do this kind of thing through a stack of sequels.
I think it’s a combination of that, as well as a marketing consideration.
If you name them 2, 3, 4, then people are expecting a sequential story or narrative- 2 is a direct sequel of 1, and 3 follows 4 with the same characters, extended narrative, etc…
If you go with something like : you give the reader/viewer the knowledge that it’s in the same basic universe, but that it’s not necessarily sequential or a continuation of the same story with the same characters, even though it can be.
Sometimes though, it’s an attempt to leech off of a successful series- see the “American Pie” movies- there are 3 direct sequels, then a bunch of unnumbered loosely associated straight-to-video movies.
There are almost as many sequel-namers as there are sequels, so I’m sure the reasons for naming are multifarious.
One WAG I’ll add to the discussion is that the Franchise: Subtitle format is more descriptive and allows audiences to know or remember what the story is. For instance which Rocky was the one where he went to Russia? Was that Rocky 3? Or wait… 4? But had that move been called Rocky: The Red Menace (or some such title) it would be much easier to remember which movie that was. In an age of proliferation of films, producers may really value that kind of easy identification.
Of course, it doesn’t help a viewer know which order to watch a set of movies in, but here’s a wrinkle: in the case of Iron Man, since this character has key events happening in The Avengers, viewing from Iron Man 2 to Iron Man 3 kinda skips a chapter if a viewer wanted to follow Tony’s story.
There’s a 3GS in between the 3G and the 4.
There is also a 4s before the 5. I don’t think they are counting the s-editions when numbering.
The Final Fantasy game series is up to XVI now.
Yep, they maintained high quality all the way up to Final Fantasy X, and possibly XII(I liked it less, but it was still impressive), but 13 and 15 have been atrocious. One weird thing Final Fantasy did was even include the online games as part of their numbered series instead of a separate thing. So you have these single-player JRPG games with two of them(11 and 14) being MMORPG and is really weird.
I will be stunned if FF16 is any good at all. I found 13 boring and 15…15 was astonishingly dull. And I was a big-time Final Fantasy fan.