Amph Sequels: 22 Do's and Don'ts: Don't: Just repeat yourself

Do: Add in an exciting new villain

"Star Trek: The Motion Picture isn't as bad as its reputation suggests, but the Enterprise crew's first cinematic adventure suffered from a serious lack of tension... possibly because the villain was an energy cloud. What a difference a great villain makes: Ricardo Montalban's miles-over-the-top sneering villainy in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan redefined the series for the big screen.

See Also: The T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Ralph Fiennes' Voldemort in the later Harry Potters, Lee Van Cleef in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly"

 

Add a new villain if he's the only villain in the movie. Superhero movies especially like to keep piling on the new villains in sequels and it almost never works.

 

Good point...

 

The proviso should be: Add an exciting new villain if the previous villain has been killed, removed, erased, incarcerated or rehabilitated.

If the same villain is still around, add an exciting new henchman.

 

And sure enough...

Don't: Add in too many villains

"The first two entries in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy focused on one iconic villain apiece: first the Green Goblin, then Doctor Octopus. For the third film, the filmmaker unwisely brought in three very different baddies ? the misunderstood Sandman, the vengeful New Goblin, and the shape-shifting bizarre-Spidey Venom. The result is an unfocused mess.
See Also: Batman & Robin, Iron Man 2, and most egregiously, X-Men 3. It's a surprisingly common problem for superhero sequels. Pray for The Dark Knight Rises."

 

It works if the multiple villains are brought together in a way that makes sense. Case in point: Batman Begins. Act 1 had the "Ras Al Ghul wants me to destroy the city I love! OMG!!!!!" to Act 2's "We must stop the Mob and this weird Dr. Crane guy" to the culmination of Act 3's "THEY ARE ALL WORKING TOGETHER!" It works in a nice neat package because Bruce wasn't Ras' only plan for Gotham. We believe that he is smart enough to have backup plans beforehand and it makes sense in the world Nolan creates.

Where sequels fail is when the two (or more) baddies have nothing in common before the film takes place and then (because they are EVIL!) the get together for no other reason than to stop the hero (See: Spiderman 3).

 

Same with The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent doesn't trust Batman or Gordon. The Joker tries to use Harvey Dent's mistrust to destroy Batman and destroys Harvey Dent, turning him into Two Face in the process.

 

It can work if there are lesser villains and a main villain or if both villains work together and get fair screen time. Batman & Robin failed, but Batman forever worked OK as did Batman Returns.

TDK Rises will have two villains, Catwoman & Bane, but if one is essentially playing second fiddle to the other it's not so bad.


Spider-Man 3 was a failure. You got a villain in Goblin 2 you didn't need, a villain in Sandman who was cool but not so interesting and a failure final supervillain with hardly any buildup who last about 15minutes.

I don't see Iron Man 2 as having a villain problem, Whiplash is the primary villain throughout.

 

Batman Returns is the only real exception to this rule that I can think of. Batman had the Joker; Batman returns had Catwoman, The Penguin and Max Schreck. But it works, for some reason. There's real interplay between the villains; they're not independent of each other or allied to each other either one, which really works.

 

I agree that Iron Man 2 isn't a good example. Justin Hammer and Ivan Vanko work well together because, while both antagonistic, they fill completely different types of roles. If anything, Iron Man 2 has too many heroes, with the movie juggling Tony, Pepper, Rhodey, Black Widow, and Fury without quite fully serving any of them.

 

Do: Eliminate the lame characters

"The best thing about making a sequel? Correcting your past mistakes! The first Hellboy curiously focused on a bland Everyman played by Rupert Evans. (Yeesh, even his name sounds milquetoast: ''John Myers.'') Hellboy 2: The Golden Army got rid of the character and brought the focus where it should've been all along: on Ron Perlman's goofily charismatic demon-spawn.
See Also: The purging of any reference to ''Short Round'' after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; the banishment of Jar Jar Binks to the outskirts of the later Star Wars prequels."

 

The big worry with The Avengers movie is too many heroes. Black Widow did pretty much nothing in IM2 and seems to be in Avengers for the same reason she was put in by Jon Favreau, because Scarlett Johansson looks hot.

That is another point to bring up, pointless chracters. Sure lame ones are annoying but at least they generally have a purpose (even Jar Jar) in the film. Pointless chracters are ones put in for no apparent reason, like Megan Fox in Transformers. They offer nothing to the story and their characters seem to have no useful purpose.

I enjoy looking at Megan Fox, but she can't act and if she doesn't contribute to the story then she should not be there.

 

There's a lot of people (and robots) that are neither acting well nor contributing to the Transformers movies.

 

That's mainly because the Penguin overshadows the other two as the main villain; Catwoman is a semi heroic character for most of the film and outright heroic at the end; Schreck is just a greedy, murderous businessman. The Penguin is a sociopathic freak that wants to either control everyone or kill them all.

 

Don't: Overload on continuity

"The second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies had a unique problem: They suffered from too much continuity, bringing back basically every character from the first film and incorporating all sorts of nonsensical background mythology. (Remember the voodoo priestess who turned out to be a goddess imprisoned on earth by the Pirate Lords?) Johnny Depp recently admitted to EW that the filmmakers ''had to invent a trilogy out of nowhere.'' Well, they didn't have to..."

See Also: Terminator: Salvation (which featured assorted CliffsNotes-worthy explanations of the series' time-traveling curlicues) and Quantum of Solace (which stranded Bond in a post-Casino Royale depressive funk)

 

I still say that continuity overload was what made those movies great for me, but then again mythology is what I look forward to in fantasy and sci-fi. At the moment I'm watching Lost, and couldn't care less about some main characters, but what a continuity it has.

And I'm pretty sure James Luceno would say that overload continuity is a Do

 

Yeah, I don't necessarily see how this is a problem so long as it's put together decently. For comics or a book series with multiple authors over decades, sure, because stuff is going to get contradictory very easily, but a film series (typically) has a single set of people working on it and frequently the same writer & director from film to film, which makes continuity hassles less of a big deal so long as the writer can keep it all straight through a compendium or whatever.

Plus, as the person above me said, there's a few book authors who just pull continuity together like they're a black hole of facts and the effect can be amazing.

 

I'd rather a movie series put effort into continuity and try to tie up all the loose ends and make sure they fit. It works better than throwing continuity out of the window the way the Star Wars Prequels did.

 

Doubling down on the already horrendous Keria Knightly and Orlando Bloom subplot killed the Pirates Of The Caribean trilogy, which i totally agree didnt even need to me made in the first place. However I love Johnny Depp and i'm glad he's now a trememdously wealthy man instead of just a rich one lol.

 

Do: Consider a change in scenery

"On television, sending your cast on vacation is a hoary cliché. (''The Simpsons are going to Delaware!'') But a location shift can reinvigorate a franchise. Just look at the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which leaves Hogwarts behind for a tense traveling plotline that plays out like a road movie from hell."

See Also: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Fast Five, the underrated French Connection 2, Babe: Pig in the City

Who liked that road trip? Not I.

 

I did. HP 7 did a very creditable job of taking what (to me, at least) was a fairly light-hearted children's story and pushing off in a whole different direction altogether. Main thing I disliked about 6 & 7 was the silly Nazi-shouting about Voldemort and his group. Dressing your villains like Nazis, and maybe borrowing a few terms people associate with them, is fine; out & out aping everything they did damages a villain's credibility. We know they're the bad guys; we don't need it enforced by relentlessly aping real-life bad guys.

 

Do: Make your characters more troubled

"In the first Terminator, Sarah Connor is a sweet Everygal who finds herself caught up in a terrifying assassination plot she can barely understand. For Terminator 2, writer-director James Cameron transformed Sarah into an unhinged, pumped-up paranoiac. That's the Sarah Connor that people remember.

See Also: The rebels-on-the-run in The Empire Strikes Back and the fearful and forgotten playthings of Toy Story 3."