10 Great Characters Ruined By Terrible Sequels
Hero-to-zeroes, vanishing love interests, and killers clowns turned to... well, funny clowns...
There are few feelings worse as a film fan than sitting down to the latest instalment of your favourite franchise only to discover that a beloved character has been given the short shrift by the filmmakers.
Sometimes, it’s that a new director has a bold vision for where the series should go which holds no room for old favourites. Sometimes, the studios simply couldn’t be bothered to create a new plot for their sequel, and as such decide to undo the last film’s character development in order to re-tread the same familiar territory as before for lesser results.
Whatever the cause, whilst some sequels do justice to their stars and deepen their character’s believability, just as often follow-ups ruin a much-loved figure in the eyes of the audience. In a lot of cases here, the filmmakers took the coward’s route out and simply killed off inconvenient heroes—a plague particularly common in the horror genre, where villains need to return but heroes are infamously disposable.
In other cases, once likeable heroes are reduced to insufferable jerks or side characters with a part to play are turned into one note jokes—in the worst cases listed here, characters were first ruined and then promptly killed off, a veritable worst of both worlds approach.
Whatever the case, here are ten movie characters whose sequels did them dirty.
10. Lara Jean - To All The Boys: P.S I Still Love You
Arriving on our screens in 2018, To All the Boys I Loved Before was a breath of fresh air for fans of the sometimes great, always inconsistent teen rom com subgenre.
Joining the likes of 2010's Easy A, the superb Tina Fey-scripted Mean Girls, and the nineties classic Clueless, the film excelled thanks to its likeable and relatable sweet teen heroine Lara Jean, whose life falls into hilarious disarray when a set of love letters she never intended to send are mailed off to every boy she's ever imagined courting.
Sure, the film may be far-fetched, but Lara Jean's mixture of innocence and whip-smart wit gave her an easy charm. It's one which was unfortunately completely undone in 2020's entirely misjudged sequel.
From its clumsy title to its flat direction, nothing about To All the Boys 2 was a success, but it was Lara Jean's character which suffered worse. Going from a well-meaning over thinker to a self-centred, vindictive antiheroine made her a protagonist impossible to root for, and from cheating on her love interest to leading on some likeable new suitor for weeks, there was little sign of our Lara Jean in this poorly planned follow up.