It's true that Hollywood is cynical with sequels, but there's a good reason for them too, that WE want them. Not all of them, mind you. LOL It's the same reason we watch TV series, though -- we want to spend more time with these characters. "AND THEN what happened??"
So to me, Hollywood would do well to make sequels to more originals, instead of wringing an endless number of sequels and spinoffs from properties that are creatively exhausted.
Because it is of course entirely true that Hollywood is desperate for ideas. LOL
(Increasingly, it's also because nothing works the same as it used to. Nothing that anybody has learned in the past is vaguely valid anymore. Everybody's just guessing, and in these days where there's a legal mandate to maximize profits at the expense of every single other dimension -- including creativity -- there's increasingly little room for error, and no opportunity to maximize revenue in secondary release. There's no secondary market anymore.
Another story.)
Anyway, yeah,
Spy is a perfect example of me saying, "And THEN what happened??!?" I'd LOVE a sequel! That alone made me think of three more movies.
The Fifth Element is an all-time fave. Bless our man Bruce, but he can't do it again, and no Ian Holm...plus of course no way to pay for the thing in the current climate....but a sequel/spinoff starring Jason Statham? Take my money!!!
Then just today, I was reading Melissa McCarthy
saying AGAIN that the whole cast would do a sequel to
Bridesmaids "today, like, this afternoon". Now, you may have hated Bridesmaids, or myabe you loved it like I did, whatever, but how we feel is irrelevant (except to the extent that we're the boss of this thread LOL.) What's relevant is that it made nearly TEN TIMES its budget in theaters, and
doubled that in secondary markets!!! (DVD, airplanes, cable, etc.)
Well, DVD and cable are gone as revenue sources, the cast alone would cost as much as the original $35 million budget, and the key to it making nearly $300 million worldwide (back when that was real money LOL) is that it stayed in theaters
233 days. Nowadays, it's three weekends and out, unless Tom Cruise is starring, in which case it comes out of theaters when Tom says it does. LOL
The kinda sad thing to me is that they even had the perfect setup for the second movie -- the marriage between the characters played by Melissa McCarthy (rightly nominated for an Oscar for this!) and her real-life husband Ben Falcone (the air marshal in the movie). I hope it happens.
I also loved
The Heat, with Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock, directed by Paul Feig (who also wrote and directed Bridesmaids). Sandra Bullock has done some great stuff in her career, but for my money, she hasn't yet topped this 2013 flick. (Edit: I forgot about
Oceans Eight. I liked that a lot, and yes, would love a sequel!!! I don't need any more Oceans pictures with the fellas, though, thanks. But otherwise, I stand by my previous point that The Heat among Bullock's pinnacles.)
The scene in The Heat where Sandra tries to do an emergency tracheotomy in a Denny's is hilarious...but a LOT of blood and profanity that I'll spare you. In a way, it's not unlike the food poisoning scene in Bridesmaids, in that it's grossness and over-the-topness is part of what sells it.
Here's the link to a clip of that scene, and you really should check it out. We shoulda had at least two more movies with these two.
Speaking of Bullock, I could TOTALLY have used a sequel to
Demolition Man! At the time, it was a Stallone-Snipes picture, and Stallone's best since the first Rocky, IMO. I'm not sure he's been better since.
Sandra's part was small and adorable, but she really jumped off the screen. I'd seen her in a few other things (this was 1993), but this is the first time I thought, "Wow, this girl's gonna be a star!" And the very next summer, comes Speed, and we're all off to the races from there.
So the sequel should mostly be Bullock and Benjamin Bratt (the two had SO much chemistry here that it was inevitable that they'd work together again, in Miss Congeniality -- two is just right for those pictures, btw.) Maybe a little Stallone and Snipes, but that particular story kind of played itself out, and Stallone's character would be long-retired. Although honestly, Bratt and Bullock's characters might pushing it, so we might have missed the window for this one. But I'm sorry we didn't see more of this.
Zorro is another where we've likely missed the window. Both Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas were terrific in this, and we could have used at least one more. Hopkins is out, but maybe a reboot with Banderas in the Hopkins role, passing the mantle to a new Zorro, as Hopkins had done for him? Perfect setup, sez me.
Constantine (Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz) probably won't happen because there's always another John Wick (and why not?), but you know what? I like Constantine better than John Wick, and would love sequels!
People started talking about a sequel to Charlize Theron in
Atomic Blonde almost immediately upon its release in 2017, with Netflix making noise about producing the sequel as early as 2018 -- but 5 years later, still nada. I can see why Netflix would prefer a sequel to Charlize's
The Old Guard, original to them, but guess what? No sequel there either, and should definitely be.
It also slays me that George Miller is following up her astounding turn as Furiosa with a PREQUEL starring some CHILD or another (Anya Taylor-Joy last I heard -- this is just plain wrong, though. Please don't!), when we SHOULD be getting
Mad Max: Fast and Furiosa instead. LOL More Charlize kicking butts, please.
I really loved the sequel to Top Gun, and completely understand why Tom put it off for as long as he did. He didn't want to do a sequel without a good reason, especially after the death of the original's director, Tony Scott. He found his director in Joe Kozinski, after their terrific collaboration in Oblivion. (HIGHLY recommended!) Joe had to talk Tom into it, after Tom said, "I owe you for Oblivion, and I'll always be happy to see you...but I'm busy with Mission Impossible, so I'll need you to fly to Paris, I can only give you half an hour, and I'm going to tell you no." LOL Awesome. I'd roll those dice, too, and certainly we all came up as winners.
But my favorite Tom Cruise movie might still be
The Edge of Tomorrow, which was a) perfect, b) except for the title. If the movie title had been what they used for the poster tagline --
"Live. Die. Repeat" -- it woulda made twice as much dough.
If you haven't seen it, you neeeeeed to. Tom's character is the opposite of an action hero. He's a callow, cynical PR dweeb who gets stuck in a time loop (which turns out to be entirely explicable for perhaps the first time in cinema history), and the movie's action hero is played by Emily Blunt, who I'd love to see do more action flix. She teaches him to stop whining and step up, which is awesome all by itself. I loved everything about this, and would still love a sequel, thanks for asking.
Last two, strictly for the dweebs:
Galaxy Quest really was perfect, wasn't it? It was! If you love the movie (ie, if you SAW the movie, because everybody who's seen it loves it), you need to also check out
Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary, currently exclusive to Amazon Prime, but probably sneakily available if you ask any teenagers in your life where to find it.
One of the things they mention is that they'd finally gotten around to considering a sequel, and were close to a deal when Alan Rickman died, so they gave up. Alan's loss was tragic for a million reasons, yes, but they're missing the point from a
story perspective. When one of your stars passes, pivot.
The thing is, the joke in the first movie has already been told. You can't tell it again. Rather than actors on a show that someone from another planet thinks is real, crossed with some fun around fan conventions, skip those, and start with with the other planet. I'd build it around the characters played by Tony Shalhoub and Missi Pyle (the earthling "engineer" and the shapeshifting Thermian female who clearly fell for each other) and start with their kids (the birth of whom has gotta be an awesome story by itself). You've still got Enrico Colantuoni, Jed Rees, and the other Thermians, plus Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Daryl Mitchell, and Sam Rockwell.
I could build a
good movie out of that, and I'm an idiot. Somebody who's not an idiot could build a
dandy movie out of it, even if it couldn't be quite the miracle that the first one was.
But hey, all these years after the perfect Galaxy Quest, and I'm still asking "AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED?"
Last but not least,
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension was a 1984 flop that turned into a cult hit, but I was one of those dweebs there on opening day, and probably saw it half a dozen times in theaters. Career bests (for me) from Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Christopher Lloyd, Jeff Goldblum, Vincent Schiavelli, and a terrific plot assist from Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast...and here's the thing. At the end of the movie, it said, "Buckaroo Banzai will return in Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League." Man, we couldn't wait!
And yet, 40 years later, we're still waiting. A novel by that name was released in 2021, so there's some kind of basis for the sequel, but likely? No. Do I still want it, whatever it takes? Yes!
There's another dozen or so on my list, but those are my biggies.
