9 Movie Sequels That Ruined Great Characters
Character development? More like character devolution.
We live in an age in which sequels and prequels seem kind of inevitable. As soon as a movie is successful, you can almost hear the Hollywood execs rubbing their hands together and dreaming up ways to turn the film into a cash grab franchise.
Sometimes it’s not always such a bad thing. We’ve seen some hugely successful franchises emerge in recent years that managed to keep up the quality of their films at least for the most part – take the MCU, for example, or The Lord of the Rings.
But as anyone with a couple of movie sequels under their belt can tell you, for the most part they pale in comparison to the original movie bar a few outstanding examples. Beyond all the usual sins often committed by sequels – rehashing old storylines, digging up plot holes and the like – they also have a tendency to butcher some previously brilliant characters.
Often sequels add an unnecessary amount of backstory that completely destroys the mystique or appeal of a character or recast a role with a new actor whose interpretation off the character feels off. Sometimes it’s simply down to the overexposure sequels give a character – there’s only so much of a character you can take before someone that previously felt like a breath of fresh starts to feel stale and hackneyed.
Whatever the reason, these sequels are all guilty of one thing – ruining characters we once loved.
9. Peter Parker/Spider-Man – Spider-Man 3
In the first two instalments of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, Tobey Maguire was pretty much perfect as the first big-screen incarnation of the web-slinging wonder boy. Charming in a boyish sort of way, slightly awkward but totally likeable and relatable, he perfectly encapsulated a young man coming to terms with his newfound superhero status.
But in Spider-Man 3, we see Peter Parker transformed from a wholesome and affable superhero into a cringeworthy and cartoonish caricature of evil by way of a space-borne symbiote.
It could’ve been a great opportunity to see Parker go down a darker route but the closest he got to ‘dark’ was taking fashion and hairstyle cues from emo culture and being a d**k to Mary Jane by performing an utterly embarrassing dance routine characterised by hip-thrusts and Parker imploring us to “dig on this”. We did not dig on it.
Funnily enough, Spider-Man 3 marked the end of Raimi’s series despite the fact another sequel was in the works. It was probably for the best really.