No, this isn't why. Usually. (Property of Universal Pictures)
The prospect of your favorite movie, or your favorite movie in recent memory, getting a sequel is often fraught with mixed emotions.
On the one hand, you enjoyed the first movie so much that you just might relish an opportunity to get back into that world. On the other hand, you know that a sequel is more often than not just another opportunity for the producers and folks involved in the filmmaking process to get the story wrong.
It's a lottery and, just like in the real lottery, you're more likely to get stabbed in the eye by a passing pirate captain than actually win.
The real problem for most sequels is that they, are their core, unnecessary.
Now if we're getting down to the essence of necessity, very few stories truly need to be told. There are few stories that impact humanity so deeply that they must be unleashed upon the world.
For the purpose of this piece, I'm using a much looser definition of necessity. After all, on a personal level, most writers would tell you that they had to tell this story. That's necessity, I suppose. For whatever reason, the creator felt that this story had to be told. Much like Anna Nalick's song, it's stuck inside them and wants desperately to be released.
Remember Anna Nalick? I think about her from time to time.
There's also a necessity in looking at the world and thinking that your story belongs in it. That, again, is a form of necessity.
Most sequels, though, don't qualify for any type of necessity. The only argument you could make is for an author's continued relevance in many cases, and that just doesn't count.
A new story has a much lower threshold for necessity. If someone has a story they need to tell, then that's fine. A sequel, though, has to satisfy a more strict requirement to really be necessary.
What in the original story was left undone? What was left untold? This absence is perhaps the greatest argument you can make for a sequel.
Did you leave something untold in the first story, or did the events of the first story demand another entry?
In the documentary that preceded one of the special edition VHS releases of Star Wars' original trilogy, George Lucas said, "A movie is never finished, only abandoned." I think he was actually quoting someone else, but I love this quote.
In Lucas' case, we all wish maybe he would abandon some movies sooner rather than later, but the essence of this quote is what I'm getting at.
True, any story that is told is just the shortest glimpse of a period of history in a fictional world that stretches for centuries and millennia in either direction. Much like our own world, even the greatest stories are just snapshots of the whole history.
The trick, though, is that not every epoch deserves an epic. There's a reason that J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy spends hundreds of pages and thousands of words on the journey of Frodo and Sam with the ring and only a couple paragraphs on Sam's marriage to his childhood sweetheart.
"Alright, Mr. Gamgee, have you decided on a ring?"
*Sam screams and passes out.
(Photo by Anne Edgar on Unsplash
That part of the story just isn't as interesting. We don't need to know about it.
I mean, Tolkien wrote how many books as an excuse to expand on his lore and the languages of Middle Earth, and yet he didn't see fit to write much about Sam after the ring was destroyed.
Sure, some serious Hobbit Heads (Hobbit Feet? Would that be more fitting?) would die for a romantic comedy about Sam's courtship of Rosie, but most people would find it dull.
Every story can be extended, but not every story should be.
(Okay, so maybe Cabin in the Woods and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World really can't go anywhere else, but that's an exception rather than a rule. Spoiler.)
Frank Herbert once said, "There is no real ending. It's just the place where you stop the story."
Fitting, really, since Herbert's Dune series is still going on several years after his death.
There's a great piece of advice for fiction writers out there that says you should make sure to start your story about a two minutes after the action gets going. You don't want to drop the audience into a boring world for the most part, although that can be effective for a compare/contrast.
So many sequels could benefit from this advice because, frankly, their whole story is just the boring parts after the action.
Think about that movie with Jason Segel and Emily Blunt that came out a few years ago called The Five-Year Engagement. The goal of that movie was to show what happened after the romantic comedy usually ends.
It wasn't very good. It was a sequel to a movie we never got to see, and it just didn't tell the most interesting part of the story.
Seriously. What is this guy NOT in? (Property of Universal Pictures)
It's a shame, too, because the cast was great. With Segel and Blunt and Alison Brie doing a British accent and...oh, look...Chris Pratt, it should've been a smash. But it wasn't, because it told the uninteresting part of the story.
We've all seen unnecessary sequels. We've all left a movie or put down a book and said, "Man. That was just pointless."
This happens when someone demands a sequel, even though the story is done.
I've harped on Men In Black II a lot lately, but only because it's been on TV an inordinate amount in the last couple weeks. It's a salvageable bad movie, I think, but it's also a somewhat unnecessary one. The first Men in Black ended on a beautiful note with Tommy Lee Jones' character returning to his life before aliens with the woman he loves.
The second one yanks him back out of it to watch Will Smith's character go through a similar trauma. The emotional beats in that movie are actually pretty decent, but the overall story was not well conceived.
They corrected this with Men In Black III, though, with a sequel that perfectly completes the story arc of Agents J and K while filling in a little bit of interesting history.
I think the two examples of good sequels I most look at are the original Star Wars and the fairy tale series by local author Jackson Pearce.
With Star Wars, you had a complete movie that didn't end on an absurd cliffhanger, but it did leave us wanting to know more because there was still more to tell.
Mind you, a million prequels can mess up your original movies, too, so those should be used sparingly.
With Pearce's fairy tale series, starting with the book Sisters Red, you have a set of loosely connected "sequels" that take place in the same fictional world while telling wholly different stories.
Pearce finished the story of two werewolf-hunting sisters in Sisters Red without really leaving much to wonder about, but she made us want to know more about that world. In the follow-up novels, she fleshed out a reality that was slanted from our own, much like the "Rule of One Thing" that I wrote about a while back.
Similarly, the Marvel universe works because it tells individual stories that are part of a greater story. Even though they are not immune to unnecessary sequels, and they are certainly the progenitors of the set-up film, the overall method seems to work.
These are great examples of necessary sequels because they still had a story to tell.
And you can't just leave your story hanging on a silly cliffhanger and expect us to be okay with that, unless your name is Michael Caine and you're pulling a job in Italy. Movies that try to write sequels for themselves in the first place do not create necessity. They create frustration that audiences might not want to subject themselves to further.
If you really want to make a sequel, the first story has to be a complete story. I know it sounds counterintuitive, and it seems to run contradictory to everything I've already said, but an incomplete story doesn't get a sequel so much as it gets a delayed ending.
Even when you're working on a trilogy epic like Star Wars or the Lord of the Rings, each installment has to be a complete story. Star Wars did this well, Lord of the Rings not so much. At least on film. Remember how mad audiences were that The Fellowship of the Ring just ended with Sam and Frodo walking off into the background? That's not to say that following two films were unnecessary, but the lead-in could have been handled better.
It's also worth mentioning that the book ended differently, to my knowledge. I have to admit that I've never actually read them, but they are very high on my list.
I'm not going to pretend to have all the answers in this regard. These margins are razor-thin and it's all going to be extremely subjective.
There are plenty of sequels that we can all agree are probably completely unnecessary, then there are others that we would argue back and forth about for days without coming to an agreement. That's the beauty of art.
But we'll talk more about that in the follow-up to this piece...