The 7 Worst Movie Sequels

Sequels. While the current trend in Hollywood seems to be reboots, few studio executives can escape the siren song of continued adventures.

And while there are plenty of good sequel movies that have been released, a good majority of them feel like ill-conceived plots meant to cash in on a built in fan base.

Sure, money is the driving factor pushing why a film gets made. If a movie does well enough, why wouldn’t big production studios and distributors try to build off of that? And what audience member wouldn’t want to see the further exploits of their favorite characters? It’s a win-win, right?

Not always. Not even a majority of the time. In fact, most sequels tend to be too derivative, or too nonsensical, to even merit their budgets or box office hauls. It’s a shady method for executives to bring people into theaters and fill up the seats.

But despite the fact that many sequels are bad or even subpar, they continue to come out. Actors continue to say “I’ll only do it if the script makes sense,” instead of being honest and saying, “They gave me A LOT of money.” And we continue to go see them.

Here are some of the absolute worst movie sequels that have ever hit theaters.

The Matrix Reloaded

The Wachowski’s first film in their inventive sci-fi series The Matrix established in imaginative world with a lot of fertile ground to explore.

When Warner Bros. announced that not one but two sequels would be released to create a Matrix Trilogy, fans were thrilled at the prospect of returning with Keanu Reeves, Carrie Anne Moss, and Laurence Fishburne to the artificial reality created by machines.

But then the The Matrix Reloaded hit theaters, giving us some great action set pieces with dull acting and a half-assed retread of the first film, promising big payoffs to come in its third installment.

All in all, The Matrix Reloaded could have been worth it had done the exact same thing as the original movie. While they attempted to do something interesting by exploring the human civilization outside of the Matrix and their struggle against the Machine empire, it still didn’t raise any new themes or push the stakes—it simply expanded the scope of the stakes to a bigger group of people.

But we already knew the Machines were a threat to all of humanity. So the story really fell flat before it could even get started.

We could talk about how disappointing The Matrix Revolutions was, but the less said about that, the better.

Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

Pirates Of The Caribbean can be depended on for shoving Johnny Depp down the throats of movie goers once in a few years, but no one anticipated how bad it could be until moviegoers saw Captain Jack Sparrow sword fighting on a rampaging water wheel.

Just like The Matrix Reloaded, this movie’s biggest fault is that it is merely a step in a much longer story. Films are not satisfying when they do not tell complete stories and are unable to stand on their own.

Instead, Dead Man’s Chest ends with an obligation to see another half-baked installment in the series in order to achieve any sense of payoff. It attempts to be Empire Strikes Back, complete with a cliffhanger ending, but fails entirely.

Audiences should not be tricked into seeing an expensive episode of a TV series that eventually promises to be a movie in the next release. The series learned from this mistake when On Stranger Tides, the fourth film in the series, came out.

While it seemed clear that Disney intended to make Pirates movies until they quit making money for the company, the production’s scope limited itself to what was taking place in its own runtime without setting up future films in the franchise. Now, that certainly doesn’t guarantee a good movie by itself, but it helped in the case of Pirates Of The Caribbean.

Dumb And Dumber To

The Farrelly Brothers stumbled their way into a hit film with the juvenile but humorous Dumb And Dumber. It was the height of the Jim Carey era in which all he had to do was talk out of his butthole to get a laugh.

The directors paired him with the very talented Jeff Daniels who simply amplified Carey’s own comedic stylings as if he was mimicking the former In Living Color star. And while Dumb and Dumber is far from being a comedy classic, it can elicit a chuckle or two.

The first movie was one of those things that people saw when they were younger and it etched itself into their minds as being this slapstick masterpiece. So the demand for a sequel built over the years until the Farrelly’s wasted all of their good will with an awful Three Stooges movie. They had no choice but to fulfill the will of misguided fans.

And then they delivered a poor sequel that retread all of the same ground as the first film without any of the charm. While both characters were always unbearable morons, time seemed to turn them into intolerable jerks.

The movie suffered so many setbacks during preproduction that it’s a wonder it ever got made. Maybe all parties involved should have read the writing on the wall.

Weekend At Bernie’s II

Now, Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy aren’t exactly a recipe for success. But somehow the first Weekend At Bernie’s was… a surprise, for lack of a better word.

The movie premiered at the tail end of the ’80s when slapstick plots and ridiculous scenarios dominated the comedy genre. Weekend At Bernie’s fit right in as two guys pretended to keep up an illusion that their mob-whacked boss was still alive so that they could take advantage of his Hamptons vacation home.

It was ridiculous and corny and everything you’d expect from an ’80s comedy, even if it wasn’t the funniest film of its time.

And then some genius decided that it was profitable enough to warrant a sequel, so they brought Bernie’s dead body back into the fold and added some voodoo magic to the mix.

Here’s the basic premise of the plot: Bernie has a safety deposit box with some money that the mob wants. They get a voodoo queen to cast a spell on his dead body which would then guide them to the location of the hidden box. The curse goes wrong, and Bernie only moves when he hears music.

That’s pretty much it. Now we have to stop talking about it lest we lose our own damn minds.

Cars 2

This Pixar movie might qualify as John Lasseter’s only bad movie to date.

While Cars 2 maintains the high standard of animation quality and vocal performances, the sagging story truly ignores everything that made the original great and delivers a by-the-numbers straight-to-DVD kind of plot.

The film’s first warning sign occurs at the beginning when the story picks up after Lightning McQueen’s fourth Piston Cup victory. While the first film showed the rookie hot shot’s journey from being self-centered and obsessed with winning the Cup, it ends with him sacrificing the victory in the name of sportsmanship, helping his idol Strip Weathers cross the finish line instead. Glossing over his first eventual victory, even four of them, is a narrative mistake.

But to put the focus on Mater embroiled in an espionage plot influenced by James Bond is clearly the biggest error. Mater was best used as comic relief in the first movie and the sequel proved the character can’t carry an entire film on his own.

Cars 2 was more of a cash in, an excuse to make more merchandise for children to buy and bolster Disney’s own line of toy vehicles to compete with Hot Wheels. Fortunately Pixar seems to be course correcting with Cars 3 which appears to be going back to basics by focusing on Lighting McQueen’s racing career.

The Ring Two

The original remake of the classic Japanese horror film Ringu was a great film made with a modest budget and became a box office smash.

So it makes sense to try and build off of that success and few genres can generate sequels as well as horror. But The Ring Two obviously did not have the thought and care that the first film received.

The sequel was much campier than the first film, which managed to take itself somewhat seriously despite the ridiculous aspects of the curse. The Ring Two sacrificed all of that to make Samara a more menacing villain to the point where she’s actually taunting Naomi Watts’ character.

It also seems to ignore the rules it established in the first film just to present more problems for the Keller family and their attempts to put everyone else in harms way so they can beat the curse. Not to mention the moody, bluish-gray tones created by the first film’s foggy woodland setting appeared more artificial in the second go.

It all devolves into action movie territory when Watts’ character gets sucked into the TV with a final showdown with Samara, which ends with her—no joke—pushing the stone cover back over the well as the haunting child attempts to crawl her way back up, screaming “MOMMY!”

Watts delivers her response with the same vigor as Arnold Schwarzenegger: “I’m not your f#@king mommy.”

The Hangover Part II

One of the most common complaints sequels receive is that their plots are much too similar to the first films in the series.

People said it about the Force Awakens, they said it about Speed 2, but even those deviate from the original formulas a bit. At least, a bit more than the Hangover Part II did.

The movies are essentially the same, with Part II following the first movie’s plot down to the beat. Zach Galifainakis is weird and quirky, Ed Helms is tightly wound, and Bradley Cooper pushes them past their comfort zones. They lose a friend, retrace their steps, and have an epiphany that allows them to save the wedding at the 11th hour.

Throw in a bit of transphobia and the requisite Mike Tyson cameo, you have yourself a Hangover movie.

The third film in the series attempted to change up the formula, but audiences did not respond like they did to the first two. Hopefully that is the last we see of the series.