25 movies that definitely did not need a sequel

It was ludicrous enough to have another deluxe-sized Great White pay a visit to the New England community of Amity (particularly when the species is, per marine biologist Matt Hooper, “extremely rare for these waters), but “Jaws 2” is a model of plausibility compared to what followed. “Jaws 3-D” felt like the franchise’s gimmicky last gasp, but the studio got super stupid with the Brody-stalking shark of “Jaws: The Revenge." Real-life insult to injury: Each movie deepened a pernicious misunderstanding of Great Whites, and they’ve subsequently been hunted to the point of near endangerment with little outcry from a public that largely regards them as monsters.

The film that spawned a classic Richard Pryor stand-up bit (“the devil is a low mother#@*%, jack”) should’ve cashed out with its first entry. Yes, John Boorman’s “Exorcist II: The Heretic” is a fascinatingly nutty, visually audacious attempt at a “metaphysical thriller," but the film he tried to make clashed with the held-over elements from William Friedkin’s blockbuster adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel. Blatty’s loosely connected “Exorcist” spinoff novel, “Legion,” became the very good “The Exorcist III," but it might’ve been a classic absent the shoehorned-in, demon-expelling ritual. Paul Schrader’s heady, well-intentioned “Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist” was shredded and reshot by Renny Harlin for “Exorcist: The Beginning." Neither is worth your time.

Steve Gordon’s “Arthur” was the fourth-highest grossing movie of 1981, which might’ve been the last year you could get away with the happy drunk routine. By the time Warner Bros. got around to sequelizing the Dudley Moore hit (minus writer-director Gordon, who died in 1982), increased awareness of the physical and emotional damage wrought by the disease of alcoholism had sapped the public’s thirst for another round of inebriated shenanigans. Poor timing aside, the sequel was perfectly atrocious in its own right. The 2011 remake starring Russell Brand went down like a sun-baked Schlitz.

Arthur Hiller’s adaptation of Erich Segal’s “Love Story” was the “Titanic” of its day: an unabashed weepie buoyed by two enormously appealing characters and a grandiose musical score that went for the emotional jugular. Audiences lined up to watch poor Oliver (Ryan O’Neal) lose the love of his young life, Jenny (Ali MacGraw), again and again. It was a perfect, preserved-in-amber tragedy. But Segal couldn’t leave sad enough alone. The wrongheadedness of his sequel, “Oliver’s Story," can be summed up by the film adaptation’s tagline: “It takes someone very special to help you forget someone very special.” Fans of “Love Story” felt betrayed by the implied erasure of Jenny, and they stayed way the hell away.

That “Die Hard” spawned a franchise isn’t the problem; it’s that it spawned the wrong  franchise. Based on Roderick Thorp’s novel “Nothing Lasts Forever," John McTiernan’s 1988 action masterpiece should’ve leaned more heavily on Bruce Willis’ everyman charm as John McClane, who uses his street-cop wits to defeat Hans Gruber’s heavily armed thieves. Instead, the producers turned the character into a human cockroach who improbably out-survives his adversaries. “Die Hard with a Vengeance” is the closest the series came to recapturing the thrill of watching McClane think. But by the second act, it had him getting blown through a manhole atop a geyser of water like a Looney Tunes character.

In an ideal world, James Cameron’s “The Abyss” was a box office smash in 1989, thus obviating the need for the filmmaker to muck up the tidy timeline of his emotionally resonant sci-fi classic, “The Terminator." Unfortunately, Cameron’s ambitious underwater adventure marked him as a budget-flouting control freak; the smart play was to reunite with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton and apply his conceptual/technical genius to a sequel that was as viscerally exciting as it was temporally nonsensical. Cameron wisely dropped the mic after that, leaving subsequent filmmakers to contrive utterly moronic reasons for Skynet to keep sending Terminators to the present day. The forthcoming “Terminator: Dark Fate” boasts the direct involvement of Cameron and the good fortune of following up the series’ nadir, “Terminator Genisys."

The Adam McKay/Will Ferrell comedy machine produced its first mainstream-absurdist delight with this richly imagined goof on network affiliate news and the tackiness of the 1970s in general. It was a work of peculiar genius from a creative duo joyfully breaking free of their "SNL" constraints. Given that they’d filmed enough footage to release a second feature on DVD (“Wake Up, Ron Burgandy”), there was reason to believe these characters and this milieu were, unlike most comedies, fertile ground for a revisit. The frustratingly scattershot “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues” capably demolished that notion. It’s McKay/Ferrell’s “A Day at the Races."

Upon its release in 1982, Ted Kotcheff’s “First Blood” did not feel like a franchise launcher for star Sylvester Stallone. It was a rousing, somewhat serious-minded rendition on the “don’t mess with Vietnam veterans” exploitation genre that had proved profitable over the years (most notably with John Flynn’s “Rolling Thunder”). But the laconic John Rambo wasn’t particularly cool or, ala Rocky Balboa, cuddly. As Americans shook off their Vietnam hangover, Rambo emerged as a one-man embodiment of renewed military might — and his first mission was to bloodily relitigate the conflict that brought the U.S. low. As a jingoistic cartoon with an amazing Jerry Goldsmith score and three of cinema’s all-time great (onscreen) bad guys (Charles Napier, Martin Kove and Steven Berkoff), “Rambo: First Blood Part II” is a blast. But the Afghanistan-set “Rambo III” is an overproduced bore (wherein Stallone teams up with the future Taliban to fight the Russkies), whereas 2008’s gore-coated “Rambo” is genuinely anti-human.

This diverting fantasy about a kid (Macaulay Culkin) who’s left home alone over the holidays by his parents remains one of the most unexpected smashes of all time. It topped the box office over its opening weekend in November 1990 and didn’t cede the No. 1 spot until February 1991. By the end of its theatrical run, it was the third-highest grossing film (domestically and worldwide) of all time. Its studio, 20^thCentury Fox, was obligated to make a sequel, and the lousy “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” verily reeks of obligation. There were three more sequels, the last two being made-for-television dreck.

Even with a blessedly simple hook (mad bomber remotely hijacks a city bus, ensuring the vehicle will explode if it drops below 50 miles per hour), a lot had to break right for “Speed” to become a critical/commercial sensation. So 20^th  Century Fox cycled through multiple script doctors before hiring the up-and-coming Joss Whedon to reconfigure the narrative and punch up original writer Graham Yost’s dialogue and also dodged a bullet when Stephen Baldwin turned down the lead role. And it hit pay dirt by casting the then little-known Sandra Bullock as the plucky co-lead, Annie. In short, everything that went right on “Speed” went catastrophically wrong on “Speed 2: Cruise Control” — starting with the decision that an out-of-control cruise ship in open water would thrill audiences like a speeding bus on a busy Los Angeles expressway.

Richard Kelly’s pre-apocalyptic sci-fi/horror flick barely got a theatrical release in the fall of 2001 (its dour tone was decidedly out of step with the public mood in the immediate wake of 9/11), but it acquired a fervent cult following on home video. And quicker than you can say “Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives," the producers who owned the rights to this unexpected hit were desperate to cash in with a sequel. Kelly had zero interest in rushing out a cheap follow-up to his labor of love, so don’t blame him for the horrid “S. Darko," which brought back Daveigh Chase as Donnie’s now-troubled sister, Sam. 

It’s total garbage, but Ted Kotcheff’s black comedy about two nitwits (Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman) who lug their boss’s fresh corpse around the Hamptons to maintain the illusion that he is still alive was a modest box office success in 1989 — thus necessitating a sequel that moronically ups the ante by having a voodoo priestess partially reanimate Bernie. The godawful “Weekend at Bernie’s II” is always in the conversation for Worst Sequel Ever Made, but on the bright side, it did inspire a dance craze.

This immaculately crafted 1992 neo-noir received an extremely late-in-the-day sequel 14 years later sans director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. That left journeyman helmer Michael Caton-Jones and the scripting team of Leora Barish and Henry Bean to contrive a compelling reason to revisit Sharon Stone’s iconic femme fatale, Catherine Tramell. It’s difficult to tell if they tried too hard or simply didn’t give a rip. Either way, aside from Stone giving her all (she practically had to sue the sequel into existence), the follow-up was a profoundly un-erotic dud.

“Rocky” director John G. Avildsen brought his stand-up-and-cheer expertise to this teen drama about a bullied outcast who learns karate from his apartment building’s handyman and wound up with the sleeper hit of the summer of 1984. But whereas “Rocky” lent itself to a franchise (pro boxers gonna box), Daniel LaRusso wasn’t bound for martial arts glory. Ergo, the filmmakers did the only logical thing with their sequel: They got Daniel caught up in a fight to the death on Mr. Miyagi’s home island of Okinawa (that escalated quickly). Ralph Macchio’s portrayal of LaRusso had grown so irritating by the third film that you couldn’t help but root for Thomas Ian Griffith to karate him silly. The fourth film dumped Macchio for a pre-stardom Hillary Swank, which didn't work either. Amazingly, the YouTube series “Cobra Kai” has inverted the franchise’s formula to a winning effect. Maybe three awful sequels and a ho-hum remake were worth it after all!

Harold Ramis’ chaotic, country club classic famously ended with Rodney Dangerfield declaring that everyone on the golf course at that moment was about to have sex. The ensuing orgy would’ve made for a far more interesting sequel than the labored, PG-13-rated 1988 follow-up that replaced Dangerfield’s profane yuks with Jackie Mason’s moldy Borscht Belt groaners and Bill Murray’s inspired groundskeeper antics with Dan Aykroyd’s oddly contemptuous imitation. It’s a brutally unfunny movie populated with stars who were seemingly paid in advance or not enough to put in, you know, the effort. And yet Kenny Loggins brought the melodic heat with an opening-credits anthem that’s every bit the equal of the first film’s “I’m Alright."

Having thoroughly parodied the passenger-jet-in-peril movie with “Airplane!," the filmmaking team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker bailed on the box-office-mandated follow-up, leaving Paramount to turn to its in-house hack, Ken Finkleman, to work his “Grease 2” magic on the almost adequate “Airplane II: The Sequel." Whereas the ZAZ team used the straight-faced content of 1957’s “Zero Hour!” as a narrative backbone, Finkleman indulges in random, Johnny-Carson-level spoofery. David Zucker fared much better with his sequels to “The Naked Gun” because the cop movie is a far broader topic. Also, he had Leslie Nielsen.

Disco was dead, dead, dead by the time Paramount got around to making a sequel to John Badham’s 1977 pop-cultural juggernaut. But the top studio in town somehow convinced arguably the biggest movie star on the planet, Sylvester Stallone, to write and direct a sequel that brought John Travolta’s dance-crazed Tony Manero to Broadway. “Staying Alive” is a steroid-fueled fever dream made by an egomaniacal action auteur who’d apparently never seen a musical before — or maybe he had, and he thought they all sucked, hence “Satan’s Alley” (composed by Frank Stallone at the absolute height of his powers). On one hand, “Staying Alive” is an eminently watchable disaster. Had it been the sequel to “Can’t Stop the Music," it’d be revered.

Fish-out-of-water comedies were big for Paramount in the 1980s (see: “Beverly Hills Cop”), but the studio couldn’t have possibly predicted a film with no stars would wind up being, domestically, the second-highest grossing film of 1986 (falling just $2 million shy of “Top Gun”). The film’s (occasionally problematic) charms are still evident 33 years later, but the sequel is a baffling ordeal built around the amiable Dundee (Paul Hogan) tangling with vicious South American drug dealers. A second sequel, “Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles," appeared in 2001 to the delight of no one.

The Academy Award-winner for Best Picture of 1973 was a crowd-pleasing hit starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. The 1983 sequel starred Jackie Gleason and Mac Davis and is probably most fondly recalled 36 years later — by those who were not paid handsomely to work on or appear in it — as the inspiration for a sliver of banter in a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode.

“Where were you in ‘62” was a much more innocuous question than “where were you when the Vietnam War escalated and the country tore itself apart” — which is one of many reasons why “More American Graffiti” underperformed at the box office. George Lucas handed off the writing and directing duties to Bill L. Norton (thus presaging his general ineptitude at picking successors), and yet most of the original cast — including, ever so briefly, a post-“Star Wars” Harrison Ford — returned for this somber sequel. (Richard Dreyfuss was the lone holdout.) We already knew the fates of the main characters via the closing titles of “American Graffiti," and while the sequel plays with these expectations in inventively cruel ways, it should’ve pushed further. It’s an admirable misfire, but the first film was perfect.

Clint Eastwood’s bare-knuckled Bakersfield cycle came to an abrupt end with “Any Which Way You Can” — which, reportedly, wasn’t soon enough to spare the life of the scene-stealing orangutan, Clyde, who was beaten with an ax handle by his handler for stealing doughnuts on the set. (The primate died later of a cerebral hemorrhage.) Suddenly, these movies aren't enjoyably lunkheaded trash, are they? The only reason to sequelize this redneck-courting nonsense was to give the great William Smith some two-fisted work.

Bruce Willis providing the voice of an infant was box-office gold in 1989, and it’s to the great Amy Heckerling’s credit that what sounds like an "SNL" sketch held together as a feature film. The “Clueless” director’s luck didn’t hold for the sequel, “Look Who’s Talking, Too," which brought on Roseanne Barr and Damon Wayans for additional baby banter. Despite the sequel’s commercial underperformance, the studio hit up the franchise once more with, get this, talking animals in “Look Who’s Talking Now." It’s all gone now.

Had John Belushi not speedballed himself off the planet in 1982, getting “The Blues Brothers” back together would’ve been a capital idea. Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Matt “Guitar” Murphy and the rest of the band backing up a host of R&B legends sounds like heaven, don’t it? Well, director John Landis succeeded in reuniting the band 21 years ago. Unfortunately, he couldn’t complete the long-distance call to get Belushi back in the fold. “Blues Brothers 2000” is a catastrophically unfunny movie, but it does conclude with an all-star battle of the bands featuring since-passed legends like B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Koko Taylor and Billy Preston. You can watch that on YouTube.

Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” has held up better than most of his ‘80s and ‘90s work primarily due to its sturdy, gangster-movie-inspired, rags-to-ill-gotten-riches arc. Most aspiring millionaires left “Wall Street” pledging they’d play it smarter (in a respectably crooked way) than Charlie Sheen’s character. The sequel had the right idea (good-faith vs. bad-faith capitalism) and, with Michael Douglas back as Gordon Gekko, could’ve shifted the investment conversation in a significant way. But Stone, once a great writer (whose father was a stockbroker), farmed out the script to Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff. The result is an unfocused retread of the first film’s major themes, which still resonate today.

To its credit, this nominal sequel did nothing to besmirch hardcore “Dirty Dancing” fans’ hopes and dreams for Johnny Cāstle (Patrick Swayze) and Baby Houseman (Jennifer Grey). "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights" is a prequel based on a preexisting script by NPR’s Peter Sagal that was heavily rewritten by Victoria Arch and Boaz Yakin. “Mad Men” devotees may be amused to find John Slattery and January Jones bumping around in a bad movie together, while Diego Luna’s gyrations will do the trick for those who worship at that particular church. Otherwise,  this baby should have been left in the corner.