We're incredibly used to sequels arriving very quickly. It's not uncommon for a follow-up to a new movie to be green-lit on opening weekend, while a gap of more than two years between entries feels like an eternity. Heck, Marvel have two new films out every single year; it's that extreme. But it's not always the case. Be it from long standing production issues or a director popping up twenty years later keen to continue a story, the next film in a series can take longer than you'd even think possible to arrive. To highlight just how long some sequels take, here are fifteen films that came out decades after their predecessor. These have to be proper follow-ons, not just films from the same director with similar themes (see The Wicker Tree's bordering parallels to The Wicker Man), and there can't have been any unofficial entries in the middle (think all the American Pie movies). These are proper, official sequels that took so long to make a good chunk of the audience wasn't even born when the previous film came out.
Honourable Mention - It's A Wonderful Life 69 Years On Won't Happen
When it was announced that we'd soon be getting a sequel to the unmatchable It's a Wonderful Life, subtitled The Rest Of Story, the response was understandably totally negative. Purporting to have a descendent of George Bailey visited by Zuzu, a child in the original and now an angel, to make him realise he should correct his wrong ways (so also riffing on A Christmas Carol), the film would have topped this list with a gap of 69 years. If only the guys behind it knew their copyright law. It's a well known bit of trivia that due to a clerical error It's A Wonderful Life was never copyrighted and was thus free to show on TV and, assumed by the sequel's writers, available to franchise. What's less well known is that Paramount (who brought original production studio Liberty Films) eventually managed to get control of the rights, so now the story of Bedford Falls is as tightly protected as Marvel superheroes. And when they learnt someone was trying to make a sequel to their property they stated they'd challenge anyone who tried to make a sequel in court. Thankfully since then we haven't heard a thing about The Rest Of The Story.
