On The Sunny Side of The Sequel

Not long ago I had a conversation with an acquaintance about movies.  I hadn't seen Jurassic World yet and she said it was inferior to the original Jurassic Park but superior to the two sequels that followed it.  I said that made sense based on what I'd heard about it and what I had seen of the original trilogy.  She said, "Of course, the rule of sequels.  They're almost always worse."  I didn't say it at the time, but I realized the old rule doesn't really apply anymore.

Sequels have always been a major part of the film industry but now more so than ever.  In 2014 six of the ten best performing movies in the U.S. were sequels, prequels or spin-offs which is what we'll call Guardians of the Galaxy.  Just look at the list.

1. American Sniper
2. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
3. Guardians of the Galaxy
4. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
5. The Lego Movie
6. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
7. Transformers: Age of Extinction
8. Maleficent
9. X-Men: Days of Future Past
10. Big Hero 6

Half of those titles have colons in them.  One even has a hyphen that effectively serves as a second colon.  If we consider the live-action Marvel movies as part of the same franchise, Guardians, Captain America, The Hobbit, X-Men and Transformers are all the fourth or higher entry.  We've reached a point in cinematic history where the rules of trilogies don't apply anymore.  Instead of abandoning a series after one or two failures studios keep making sequels until something sticks, AKA The Bond Method.

Maybe the method works but...

Shia LaBeouf is no one's 007.

That sounds bad and favoring old franchises over fresh new ideas is definitely a problem but you can't argue with the results.  Some of the best blockbuster movies in recent years have been the fourth installment or higher.  Just this summer the fourth Mad Max movie and the first since 1985 was praised like it was the second coming.  It has a well earned score of 97% on the rating site Rotten Tomatoes.  That's higher than Schindler's List.

I think we all know what made the difference.

Of course, all of the Mad Max movies have pretty impressive scores, all "Certified Fresh."  The Fast and The Furious franchise on the other hand was for years seen as the epitome of low-brow trash.  The first one got a 53% in 2001 and it only got worse from there until Fast Five shot up to a respectable 78%, the next one a 69% and the most recent Furious 7 pulled off an 81%.  Similarly Mission: Impossible was seen as a poor man's Bond or Bourne until 2011's Ghost Protocol and 2015's Rogue Nation, which both earned a 91%, over 20 higher than any of the previous three.  It's not quite as extreme of a U-turn as Fast and Furious but still impressive.

Maybe the first indication that sequels could start to outperform their predecessors was the rise of the superhero genre.  Because the first in a superhero series is usually a familiar and formulaic origin story, the second movie is where things can really take off.  Arguably, that's been the way since Christopher Reeve and Richard Donner basically created the superhero film genre in 1978.  At 93%, the classic Superman is just barely higher rated than Superman II at 89%.  There's certainly room for discussion there and plenty of people justifiably consider Superman II the best movie about my favorite Kryptonian.  The next great superhero series didn't arrive until 1989's Batman which has a score eight percent lower than its sequel's 80%.

The nu-metal blaring half-vampire vampire hunting Blade, which was the first financially successful Marvel movie in 1998, has a score of 54%, three points lower than Blade II.  Those low scores are probably why the narrative of the superhero renaissance often overlooks Blade and instead credits the X-Men series with kicking off the Marvel Age of movies.  2000's X-Men scored 81% and X2 scored 86%.  A couple of years later Sam Raimi's beloved Spider-Man premiered, gaining an 89% followed by Spider-Man 2, which has a 93%, is almost universally considered one of the greatest superhero films ever made, and is one of my personal favorite movies.

Oddly enough, one of the most prominent examples of a superhero sequel that's actually worse than its predecessor is Amazing Spider-Man 2.  The sequel to a reboot scored almost 20 points lower than The Amazing Spider-Man's 72%.  In a few years Spidey will be rebooted again when he joins the same Marvel Cinematic Universe as the Avengers, which is a big mixed bag of sequel quality.  2008's Iron Man, the mother of the Avengers, scored 94% but Iron Man 2 has a much lower but still respectable 72% and Iron Man 3 has 79%.  Thor starts off with a 77% and its aggressively mediocre sequel has a 66%.  2011's Captain America: The First Avenger has a 79% and the aforementioned Winter Soldier, another personal favorite and a highlight of the MCU, has a much better 89%.  The Avengers, a perfect action movie, has a 92% and the much more complicated?, let's go with complicated, Avengers: Age of Ultron has a 74%.

Yes.  Complicated.

Even after disappointments like The Dark World and Age of Ultron fans flocked to Ant-Man and will probably do the same for next year's Captain America: Civil War, myself included, because to be a fan of anything you have to be forgiving.  You can't give up on a football team after a bad season and you can't give up on a musician after one bad album.  That's why earlier this week people broke the Internet trying to buy tickets to Star Wars VII even though the overwhelming majority of those people thought the three movies that came before it were the greatest threat to humanity since a time traveler almost stepped on an single-cell organism once billions of years ago.  Still, it's worrying to think that all of this franchise loyalty makes it harder for the next Star Wars that isn't actually Star Wars to break through.  Nevertheless, you can be sure I'll watch the Rocky continuation Creed but then again I'd watch just about any movie where Michael B. Jordan punches people in the face.  There's no way I'm missing Spectre but I've seen every Bond movie since Casino Royale as long as you count sleeping through Quantum of Solace.  And I'll certainly be in theaters for The Force Awakens but I'd do the same for any movie that has Oscar Isaac and the original cast of Star Wars and lightsabers and the Millennium Falcon and Gwendoline Christie and Adam Driver and more lightsabers and is directed by J.J. Abrams.