11 Movie Sequels That Turned Badasses Into Total Wimps

It's always an issue when any franchise - big screen, small screen or video game - is hyper-extended by money-men looking to capitalise on particular characters or individual elements that only worked because they weren't the main focus, or because they were atypically appealing. The pursuit of a brand without thinking has historically led to ill-conceived sequels like The Blair Witch: Book Of Shadows, and unfortunately Hollywood continues to ignore the pitfalls of reinvention entirely.

For that reason beloved characters are pushed through a mangle because story innovation requires something new of them, and writers aren't capable of building an engaging universe around the elements that the audience actually likes. Nobody seems to realise that the characters are king, and that it isn't enough to just rely on them looking the same, or having the same name - they have to have the same substance and the same appeal, or audiences are left cold and angry.

It is particularly annoying when writers take a bad-ass character and reinvent them without the darkness or the swagger, and we're left watching something that might look the same, but which fundamentally lacks soul and the edge that once made them so endearing.

Whether it is because their ridiculous scripts require a betrayal of the character to sell a story, or because of some wayward agenda to make them more Hollywood, it is often the bad-asses who come off the worst in the pursuit of sequels...