Some of the greatest genre movies of all time are sequels. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back; Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; The Godfather Part II; The Dark Knight; Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow. OK, maybe not that last one, but you get the idea. There is absolutely no reason that lightning can’t strike twice, or even three, four, five, six times, if the will and creative verve are in place.
And yet there is also a law of diminishing returns. This week Planet of the Apes writer-producer team Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver revealed that they are planning another five films in the dystopian sci-fi series, after the barnstorming box office and critical success of latest instalment Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Last week we discovered that Lord of the Rings legend Peter Jackson is overseeing a new movie about Gollum that will retread territory skipped over in the Oscar-winning trilogy from the turn of the century. The Mandalorian and Grogu, which this week announced that sci-fi scream queen Sigourney Weaver is joining its cast in an undisclosed role, will be the 12th full-length live action Star Wars film to hit the big screen. The Marvel Cinematic Universe currently stands 33 movies strong. And these are the big budget, tent-pole franchises, the ones with the bucks to hire the top talent. Can any of us honestly say they are all getting better?
To be fair, the Planet of the Apes franchise seems to be in a good place, even if it’s hard to imagine another five sequels rearing their furry simian heads over the next 20 years or so. But the news that Aragorn will soon be dragging Gollum around the dead marshes, more than 20 years after we saw Andy Serkis’s hideous creature toppling into the fires of Mount Doom, felt like a new low for Hollywood sequelitis. The internet this week has been full of articles speculating on which portions of The Lord of the Rings Warner Bros will borrow from next for new content (and they have already said this is happening), with suggestions ranging from a buddy movie starring Legolas the Elf and Gimli the Dwarf to a feature length adaptation of e The Scouring of the Shire (the amusing but slightly superfluous bit at the end where the Hobbits return to the Shire and banish a diminished Saruman from Bag End). It goes without saying that there’s a reason this stuff was left out of the movies.
Could Hollywood just be looking in the wrong place? There are numerous standalone genre movies ripe for franchise potential that have somehow never been exploited, usually because the original entry performed poorly at the box office, or just failed to catch the zeitgeist. Pete Travis and Alex Garland’s Dredd (2012) never quite, for me, captured the burlesque nuttiness of the 2000 AD comic book source material, but as a dark and stylish prelude to further episodes set in the future world of Mega City One, it was in its own way as promising as Batman Begins or Iron Man were to their respective DC and Marvel macro-sagas. Yet we never got to see part two. Give me an origin story focused on the birth of Psi-Division or a Mad Max-style trip alongside Dredd into the horrifying nuclear-irradiated wastelands of the Cursed Earth any day if the alternative is a film about Aragorn and Gollum bumming around the outskirts of Mordor for 180 minutes.
Is it too late for Garland to offer up a sequel to his darkling AI tale Ex Machina, a deliciously barbed and claustrophobic examination of the human psyche that told us everything we needed to know about the potential for machines to work us out and take control? Would android Ava dwindle in significance once living in the real world beyond twisted genius Nathan Bateman’s sickly tech-bunker, just as that third season of Jonathan Nolan’s initially brilliant TV adaptation of Westworld lost all its futuristic glitter and jumped the robo-shark once we left the hi-tech theme park? It’s hard to know, but I want to find out a whole lot more than I care about how long it’s going to take the humans of Planet of the Apes to retrogress completely into drooling proto-Eloi.
How about Inception 2, from Christopher Nolan? The British-American auteur has steered clear of sequels since completing his bravura Dark Knight trilogy, but there are surely dozens more intriguing tales to be told within the head-spinning inner worlds of the human psyche introduced last time out. The first movie only touched the surface of what’s possible when the bank vault you are trying to break into is somebody’s cerebrum, and we’re dying to find out if that stainless steel spinning top ever comes crashing down, or whether Marion Cotillard’s nefarious Mal was right all along. Empire Magazine recently teased an image suggesting there might just be some news on the horizon, though it turned out to just be bait for a Nolan-themed cover, so who knows if this will ever happen. Much as I love Chris Hemsworth’s hunky Norse god, it would almost certainly be a lot more exciting than watching Thor 4.
The list goes on. Edge of Tomorrow 2? Loopers? Dare I even suggest John Carter 2? And then there are indie sci-fi party starters such as I Am Mother and District 9, which have always felt like the perfect amuse bouches for a smörgåsbord of futuristic episodes set in these unique universes. We even thought we might be getting District 10 a few years ago when Neil Blomkamp began talking up the idea of a return to the story of the Sharlto Copley’s cruel functionary Wikus van der Merwe and his journey from callous abuser of the alien “prawn” immigrants of fictional post-apartheid South Africa to potential future comrade.
Blomkamp’s suggestion that the follow-up might be based on a powerful moment from American history always seemed out of sync with the setting of the first film, but at least there appears to have been some original thinking under way. And let’s face it, even a weak sequel would be more intriguing than a pointless segue about the latter years of Sam Gamgee and his many visits to the pub.
