Are All These Hollywood Sequels Really Sustainable?
By Movieguide® Contributor
The top 10 grossing movies of 2024 are all sequels, but follow-up flicks may not be sustainable in the long run.
“The top 10 grossing movies of 2024, from INSIDE OUT 2 to KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, are all sequels,” Variety writer Owen Gleiberman reported Nov. 30. “Every…one of them. WICKED and MOANA 2 will soon break into the top 10 — and though WICKED isn’t technically a sequel, when you consider how many people have seen the original Broadway show, the truth is that the movie version, as much as any sequel, is a kind-of-the-same-but-also-different follow-up to a gargantuan known quantity. It’s all part of déjà vu entertainment culture.”
READ MORE: MOANA 2 REVIEW
“Making jokes about the creative bankruptcy of films with Roman numerals after their title was a wrung-out cliché by 1985. Back then, a sequel rarely lived up to the original,” Gleiberman said. “From STAYING ALIVE to FLETCH LIVES, from BEVERLY HILLS COP II to POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE, almost all of them were tacky cash grabs. Yet once in a while you’d see a worthy one, like ALIENS or STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN.”
Movie critic Anne Thompson points out that studios are attracted to remakes and sequels because originals can be a bigger risk.
But right now, there’s a higher standard for sequel movies. They’re no longer cash grabs but genuine efforts to further franchises and develop good stories.
“The top 10 movies of 2024 offer a perfect snapshot of that,” Gleiberman said. “INSIDE OUT 2, the top-grossing movie of the year, is an enchantingly awesome sequel to the last great original Pixar film.”
READ MORE: INSIDE OUT 2 BREAKS INTO TOP 10 ANIMATED MOVIES OF ALL TIME
DESPICABLE ME 4 and DUNE: PART 2 also got very good ratings.
“TWISTERS isn’t nearly as good as TWISTER, but it’s good enough to get by. GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE is meh. KUNG FU PANDA 4 is meh. BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE throws off surprising sparks of witty energy. And the human-free prequel KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES proved to be one of the most captivating entries in that series,” Gleiberman stated.
Teen Vogue noted it’s not just sequels that are all the rage but also spin-offs, prequels, reboots, remakes and live adaptations. MOANA and LILO AND STICH both have live-action adaptations underway.
But right now, “Hollywood sequel culture, in other words, is in reasonably healthy creative shape,” Glieberman continued. “And given how much it’s now dominating commercially, in an industry that’s existentially threatened enough to need every theatrical hit it can get, no one in their right mind would dispute the need to make these films. Sequels are luring people into theaters in a way that the most acclaimed movies of the year, from ANORA to CONCLAVE, are not. Where would the current movie landscape be without them?”
But the sequel sensation points to something concerning: the industry is looking backward.
“Hollywood has always cannibalized itself,” Gleiberman explained. “But the thing is, it hasn’t just cannibalized itself. The contradiction of sequel culture, and the threat of it, is that if all you rely on is concepts from the past, you’re not going to produce enough of a future.”
“To put it in the industry’s corrupt terms: There won’t be enough hit movies to make sequels to,” he said. “Sequel culture contains, by definition, an element of non-sustainability. And when it comes to the trend of making sequels to 40-year-old movies, how many times can we really go back and strip mine the primal nostalgia of films like TOP GUN and BEETLEJUICE? (Tom Cruise is said to be trying to line up a sequel to DAYS OF THUNDER. What’s next, Ridley Scott’s LEGEND II?)”
While many sequels have been hits, the industry can’t thrive like this.
“It’s sustaining without being nourishing,” Gleiberman says. “As the movie industry fights to survive, any film that helps it do so probably deserves a tip of the hat. But the industry can’t ultimately survive unless it figures out a way to make movie culture survive. It will do that only by keeping its eye on the road ahead more than on the rearview mirror.”
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