10 Upcoming Movie Sequels That Are Only Going To Disappoint You
Familiar franchise that are guaranteed to fall victim to the law of diminishing returns.
When it comes to investing hundreds of millions of dollars into something in order to turn the maximum amount of profit, Hollywood always finds it much easier to rely on an established brand at the expense of taking a chance on anything new.
Sequels, reboots, remakes and franchises are often low-risk, high-reward enterprises, which has resulted in the demise of the mid-budget movie and an increasing sense of uniformity and formula in the annual parade of blockbusters.
You can't argue that the approach doesn't work, because outside of James Cameron's Avatar and Titanic you'd have go all the way down to Zootopia in 44th place to find the highest-grossing movie in history that wasn't based on a pre-existing property of any kind.
However, a lot of sequels don't even have a real reason to exist other than taking your money, and are more often than not precision-engineered in studio boardrooms rather than springing from the imagination of a filmmaker. The track record for these big budget follow-ups is becoming ever spottier, and there's already plenty of new installments for various franchises on the horizon that stand little chance of living up to expectations.
10. The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes
The Hunger Games was one of the few attempts in mounting a literary franchise in the wake of the Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter boom that managed to make it all the way to completion, although the decision to stretch the final installment out over two movies unsurprisingly resulted in the two weakest entries, with box office returns also gradually declining.
Whenever a lucrative property runs out of source material to mine, the prequel route is always lurking just around the corner, so it came as little surprise when it was announced that Lionsgate were working closely with author Suzanne Collins as she worked on upcoming novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which is set to hit bookshelves in a matter of weeks.
The Hunger Games movies were solid-if-unspectacular adaptations that failed to inspire the sort of rabid following that greeted Potter or Twilight, and we're now half a decade removed from the height of the series' popularity, and revenue already dropped by over $200m between Katniss' second and fourth adventures.
The fact that the studio are so heavily involved in the book indicates that there's little motivation behind it other than to keep the franchise alive, and it seems unlikely that audiences will be anywhere near as interested as they were the first time around, especially with an all-new cast of characters involved.