9 Movie Sequels That Made You Hate Characters You Once Loved

Remember when Indy and Marion worked?

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull Harrison Ford Karen Allen
Lucasfilm

One of the biggest crimes a sequel can commit against movie-goers (and there's a lot) is changing a character you love. How dare Hollywood take it upon themselves to mess with established heroes and villains, forcing you to reconsider what you actually liked about them in the first place... what's wrong with just leaving things as they are?

And yet this is one of the big risks that La La Land takes on a frequent basis when they opt for the ill-fated follow-up film, usually when the crew changes or they bring a new writer on board; the potential to re-write the personality of a character to the point where they're rendered as a mere shadow of their former self is just too much, it seems. Sometimes it's like the old version never existed in the first place - as if the actor in question were playing a completely different person all together.

Here are nine of the worst offenders from a number of questionable sequel films, all of which managed to horribly mangled beloved characters with gusto. Yay.

9. Marion Ravenwood - Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull Harrison Ford Karen Allen
Paramount

Oh, Marion. Once regarded as the best female character in the Indiana Jones franchise, you were totally ruined by a middling, cringeworthy turn in a movie that never needed to exist in the first place - one so awkward and ill-judged that you made Temple Of Doom's Willie Scott look good.

We're talking, of course, about Marion unexpectedly coming back into Indy's life in the alien-centric disaster that was Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. Here, the once gutsy, badass heroine of Raiders of the Lost Ark - the only female character in the Indy series who didn't turn out to be a shrieking mess or a Nazi collaborator - made a late-life appearance as a demented "momsy" type.

Granted, Marion was the only woman ever deserving of Indy's affection, so it made sense to bring her back, but her role in Kingdom paints her as a bickering old biddy, totally out of her element. It wasn't just that Spielberg and Lucas forgot what originally made Marion great, either; Karen Allen forgot how to act in the years between Raiders and Kingdom, and it ain't pretty to watch her trying.

Way to spoil one of cinema's great heroines in one fell swoop, guys.

Contributor

Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.