Pop Culture for Fun

Building up franchises is nothing new to the world of cinema. It has been going on since the early days (William Powell and Myrna Loy enjoyed three movies in the Thin Man series starting 1934, I don’t have to mention Bond, but I do, and even Sergio Leone did his Dollars trilogy). Now, taking the blockbuster and horror movie sequels off the table, we’re left with a few peculiar types of sequels. There’s the TV to film sequels (as in Firefly went Serenity), the sequels that follow book series (see the Bridget Jones’ Diary series, Twilight, Lord of the rings, the Jason Bourne movies), the actual trilogies (not counting anything that wasn’t thought out as a trilogy from the start, so The Godfather, Star Wars), and then there are the recently popular sequel/reboots. Instead of going for something like J.J. Abrams did with Star Trek, or Christopher Nolan with Batman Begins, the studios are doing updated sequels to long dead movie series, hoping to draw in fans of the originals, promising the same experience by getting some of the people involved back, which is both interesting and scary at the same time.

On one hand, you’ve got Mad Max 4 (or Mad Max: Fury Road as it is called), with George Miller on board, but no Mad Mel Gibson (though insane is more likely these days). Personally, despite Miller having done a couple of interesting movies after the trilogy (The Witches of Eastwick, Lorenzo’s Oil, Babe: Pig in the City – yes, Babe: Pig in the City), I can’t picture, all puns aside, a Mad Max movie without Mel Gibson. They’ve got Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky, which isn’t too bad a choice, he was fine in RocknRolla and Layer Cake, but it’s just not the same. Thinking back, it was probably Gibson’s inherent craziness that served him so well in the portrayal of not just Mad Max, but other characters as well (think Lethal Weapon’s crazy-suicidal Martin Riggs, that was obviously him playing a restrained version of himself).

Tron: Legacy has a solid cast and a link to the past, just like Mad Max, in none other than Jeff Bridges(I’m sure I’m not the only one that would watch anything as long as he’s in it). That’s enough to get the inner geek cheering, but the director, Joseph Kosinski, is pretty much an unknown, with little to no previous experience. This is pretty much geek territory and those, as you know, are pretty hard to please. So, while the trailer looked good, and the movie also stars Olivia Wilde (about time she was in something more high-profile) and Michael Sheen (you have to love a talented serious actor that loves to do entertainment), I’m pretty apprehensive about this one.

Then there’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, a.k.a. Wall Street 2 (I don’t really know when studios started applying the Bond naming technique to sequels), Why they think it’s a good idea to do a sequel to a classic so long after the original, I don’t know, but as with the others, there are callbacks to the first movie, namely Oliver Stone returning as director, and Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas back to being Bud Fox, and Gordon Gekko. While the timing is somewhat right for economy themed movie, the writers attached aren’t exactly attuned to the field of economics, neither are they big names. Then there’s the issue of Shia LaBeouf. While I have nothing against him and consider he’s a decent actor, taking this role means he’ll be in yet another (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull being the other) movie that will fail to please die hard fans, and he has the same task of picking up the reins, which didn’t go so well for Mutt the last time. On the other hand, Susan Sarandon, Eli Wallach and Josh Brolin are on board so it may turn out to be an OK movie.

While I’m not exactly the type to cheer dusting off the old cape (some things should be left alone), I’m not one to consider a downright awful sequel does anything to the original. So, besides tarnish the reputation of those involved, what harm can come of these movies? After all, isn’t it better to maintain some continuity in the land of the three Rs – reboot/remake/re-imagining?