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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1933 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 1, 2026

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Why do you think it is impossible to create good Terminator and Predator sequels past part 2 (I stand firm that predator 2 is underappreciated)

Because the more sequels you add to any franchise, the more it gets diluted. You have your novel idea, that's the first movie. You have questions arising or undeveloped plot points from the first movie, that's your second. Maybe you can get a third out of it, but from that point on, you're just trapped in Flanderization (see all the slasher movie/horror movie franchises which run out of ideas until they're at the point of "for the fifteenth time, the dead serial killer is resurrected but this time in, uh, spins wheel of fortune space!")

What pisses me off is the constant drive to create sequels that recontextualize the originals as only one part of a larger narrative with higher stakes that is almost always less creative than the original vision. It actively damages story of the original unless you decide to be arbitrary with canon. See, for instance, Alien. The monster being just a monster that can hunt humans effectively is very good. It is actively harmed if you actually need to know that it was found because David in Alien Covenant did blah blah blah... and in Prometheus we learn that the xenomorphs are actually... None of that shit matters, let the monster be a monster, I don't WANT the answers, the unknown is better.

A sequel should be another story. For instance, in Ghostbusters II, they don't suddenly decide that actually, that Goser in first movie was just Vigo's lieutenant and now the real battle is happening. For all we know, the stakes are similar between the two movies, maybe even lower in the second one (after all, they're no longer facing a literal god of antiquity).

A sequel should be another story.

For fairly good examples of this, see Indiana Jones 2 & 3. They don't try to reinvent the canon of the first movie but are simply further adventures that Indy embarks on.

I tend to avoid sequels for this reason. I think some of it is, for me, that the world building in a brand new story is really interesting, but sequels either drag along accumulated baggage of the world (Marvel of late has done poorly on this), or lazily skip over any new exposition within the narrative (this script was originally an episode for another TV show). Both end up being detrimental to the story as a whole. And sometimes you start running into the structural contradictions woven into the environment.

I think successful sequels have to do something to transcend the original story. Terminator 2 and Aliens both subvert the genre from horror to action movie IMO successfully. The Empire Strikes Back is a very different movie than Star Wars. But that isn't a guarantee of success: IMO all the Jurassic Park sequels fall short of the original in emphasizing "dinosaur eats humans" action over the original's balance with philosophical science fiction questions.

The Empire Strikes Back is a very different movie than Star Wars.

To be fair, that falls into the category of "second in a trilogy", which is narratively and structurally different from "sequel". At least, it should be, but writers are often hacks.

To be more precise, Star Wars is a two-part trilogy, where the original movie is made as a standalone, and its outstanding success results in two sequels made back-to-back that are better understood as two halves of one big movie than as two separate movies (The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean are also good examples).

Ironically I think Flanderisation is what made the Fast & Furious franchise succeed. The story was only ever an excuse for over the top stunts and car fighting, and each sequel progressively shrinks the story and inflates the stunts to increasingly absurd proportions (including cars in space).

Yeah, I think for something where the plot is only an excuse for the ACTION!!!, you can get away with it (though as we've seen, Marvel have managed to milk the cow dry, with people finally getting burned out on the plethora of movies being released). I might go see a fourth Iron Man movie. I'm unlikely to go see Ant-Man. When we get to "nobody knows or cares about this character, why are they getting a movie?", you stay home and see if there's anything on Netflix.

I might go see a fourth Iron Man movie. I'm unlikely to go see Ant-Man. When we get to "nobody knows or cares about this character, why are they getting a movie?"

Iron Man was the first "nobody knows or cares about this character". He was the best B-list guy that Marvel Studios could pull out of a hat, and they settled for him because their A-list characters (Spiderman, Wolverine and the X-Men, Hulk, Fantastic Four) all had movie IP either sold to or at least encumbered by other studios. They had him played by Robert Downey Jr., then a C-list actor most famous for tabloid-bait substance abuse problems. It just turned out that RDJ was still an excellent actor, who managed to answer the "why are they getting a movie" question so well that we forgot it was ever even a question.

Later they started digging into their D-list characters ... and they still managed to hit it out of the park: Guardians of the Galaxy is the top-rated non-sequel movie in the MCU.

The problem isn't that nobody cares about C-list Ant-Man (whose first movie is higher-rated than Iron Man 2 or Iron Man 3), the problem is that the damn producers, directors, and writers stopped caring about Ant-Man. In Ant-Man 3 there's no significant character growth, meager personal/emotional stakes, no proper utilization of the drama they set up for him in Endgame, a cast crowded to the point that he felt like an extra in his own movie, and "ACTION!!!" that's so flooded with CGI that even the most basic physical conflict feels about as tense as playing a video game. Ant-Man seems to primarily be there because giving him top billing was expected to lure in an audience (which your testimony suggests was somewhat pointless), and their major concern for the audience was that we be exposed to a plot focused on setting up Kang as a multi-movie villain (which turned out to be completely pointless after they had to fire Jonathan Majors).

Their new plan is to bring in Doctor Doom (an A-list villain), played for some reason by RDJ (now an A-list actor), but you still might want to consider staying home and browsing Netflix, because dragging back RDJ suggests that they're still focusing on how to lure in an audience rather than on A-list writing.

Doctor Doom could be great but (1) you need to have a decent actor playing Reed Richards as the deuteragonist and (2) you need a really good writer not to make Doom stupid, Richards weak and stupid, and avoid temptations about ret-conning or making the villain too sympathetic and (3) yes, you do need Reed Richards, Victor has set up his entire notion of revenge against him even if stepping back and looking at it as an outsider that's dumb, Victor and (4) don't forget that he's ruler of Latveria and well-regarded by his people since he is actually a decent ruler, don't make him some kind of 'this is commentary on Trump authoritarian fascist dictator Amerikkka nazi bad guy'.

I don't trust any studio right now to pull that off.

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