Is Hollywood’s Addiction to Sequels Cannibalizing Its Future?
The other day, as I was looking up a data point on boxofficemojo.com, I noticed something that shocked me: The top 10 grossing movies of 2024, from “Inside Out 2” to “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” are all sequels. Every goddamn one of them. “Wicked” and “Moana 2” will soon bring break into the top 10 — and though “Wicked” isn’t technically a sequel, when you consider how many people have seen the original Broadway show, the truth is that the movie version, as much as any sequel, is a kind-of-the-same-but-also-different follow-up to a gargantuan known quantity. It’s all part of déjà vu entertainment culture.
The reason I was shocked by the fact that I could be shocked by this is that Hollywood has been famously awash in sequels since the dawn of the Reagan era. Making jokes about the creative bankruptcy of films with Roman numerals after their title was a wrung-out cliché by 1985. Back then, a sequel rarely lived up to the original. From “Staying Alive” to “Fletch Lives,” from “Beverly Hills Cop II” to “Poltergeist II: The Other Side,” almost all of them were tacky cash grabs. Yet once in a while you’d see a worthy one, like “Aliens” or “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.”
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Now, of course, they tend to be much better. In our time, the definition of a sequel — the way that audiences think of them — has fundamentally changed. Good, bad, or indifferent, they’re no longer automatically chintzy rehashes. They are often part of franchise empires, and even when not they tend to be marked by a certain ambition, an impulse to aim higher and spin themselves less cynically than the old sequels did.
The top 10 movies of 2024 offer a perfect snapshot of that. “Inside Out 2,” the top-grossing movie of the year, is an enchantingly awesome sequel to the last great original Pixar film. “Deadpool & Wolverine” is nasty spectacular quip-laden fun, far better than “Deadpool 2.” “Despicable Me 4” is arguably the best entry in that series since the original. “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is a piece of gothic prankster fan service, but on that level it delivers. “Dune: Part 2,” in the eyes of “Dune” heads, is superior to “Dune” (I’m allergic to all “Dune” films, but whatever). “Twisters” isn’t nearly as good as “Twister,” but it’s good enough to get by. “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is meh. “Kung Fu Panda 4” is meh. “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” throws off surprising sparks of witty energy. And the human-free prequel “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” proved to be one of the most captivating entries in that series.
Hollywood sequel culture, in other words, is in reasonably healthy creative shape. And given how much it’s now dominating commercially, in an industry that’s existentially threatened enough to need every theatrical hit it can get, no one in their right mind would dispute the need to make these films. Sequels are luring people into theaters in a way that the most acclaimed movies of the year, from “Anora” to “Conclave,” are not. Where would the current movie landscape be without them?
And yet…there’s something a little skewed about this picture. I can’t recall a moment when sequels crushed the box office this definitively. (Fifteen out of the year’s top 20 grossing movies are sequels.) The sequelization of Hollywood in the ’80s represented a trend all too neurotic in its reality: that the industry, in becoming addicted to “surefire” hits, had grown more comfortable looking backward than forward. Maybe that was always true, to a degree. In the studio-system era, Westerns weren’t sequels, but hundreds — thousands — of them were built out of the same rawhide parts. Superhero movies, in many ways, are the contemporary equivalent.
Hollywood has always cannibalized itself. But the thing is, it hasn’t just cannibalized itself. The contradiction of sequel culture, and the threat of it, is that if all you rely on is concepts from the past, you’re not going to produce enough of a future. To put it in the industry’s corrupt terms: There won’t be enough hit movies to make sequels to. Sequel culture contains, by definition, an element of non-sustainability. And when it comes to the trend of making sequels to 40-year-old movies, how many times can we really go back and strip mine the primal nostalgia of films like “Top Gun” and “Beetlejuice”? (Tom Cruise is said to be trying to line up a sequel to “Days of Thunder.” What’s next, Ridley Scott’s “Legend II”?)
Sequel culture, like a lot of addictions, is exciting and depressing at the same time. We want that mainline hit of déjà vu narcotic. Yet with very rare exceptions, we can’t go back again — not fully, not really. Just consider the super-ambitious, aiming-high sequels this year that didn’t entirely work, not because there was any cynicism to their making but because the movies they were following up were so potent in their originality. “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” was an epic prequel to a movie that was better off not having one. “Joker: Folie à Deux” spent most of its courtroom scenes chewing over the split-personality dazzle of… “Joker.” And “Gladiator II” may have cast the wrong lead actor, but what actor could have matched what Russell Crowe brought off in “Gladiator”?
We all know the fabled list of sequels that are powerfully artful in their own right, to the point of possibly being greater than the movies they were sequels to (“The Godfather Part II,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” “The Dark Knight”). But the dirty truth is that you can just about count that list of movies on one hand. Sequel culture craves that déjà vu nirvana, but like all addictions it provides a high that eats away at you at the same time. It’s sustaining without being nourishing. As the movie industry fights to survive, any film that helps it do so probably deserves a tip of the hat. But the industry can’t ultimately survive unless it figures out a way to make movie culture survive. It will do that only by keeping its eye on the road ahead more than on the rearview mirror.
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