12 Awful Movie Sequels That Franchises Completely Ignored

Who needs to reboot when you can simply ignore?

By Simon Gallagher /

Warner Bros.

You'd think that Hollywood would have the decency to own up to its mistakes. When bad films come out, they should be mounted as examples of over-reaching or misjudgement, in the hope that everyone involved (and those watching on) could learn lessons in the failure.

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But then, the industry infamously has a fascination with reboots, which is pretty much a licence to putting your mistakes in the bin and just carrying on regardless. And sometimes, studios don't even bother to reboot to achieve the same effect: they simply decide that some sequels once considered a key part in a franchise no longer deserve to exist.

It's a clever remedy when you think about it, particularly as it means you can keep the best elements of what is already working in the franchise and simply sweep the bad bits under the rug. And it's a more sensible, more bankable move than rebooting entirely in most cases.

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Recently, franchises as big as Alien and Terminator have publicly flirted with the idea of simply ignoring some instalments for new projects, and when you consider some of the movies that have been scrapped, it's not hard to see why it might be appealing...