10 Films That Teased Great Sequels (That Never Happened)

Still waiting for Christopher Nolan's Robin trilogy...

Dark Knight Rises Joseph Gordon Levitt
Warner Bros. Pictures

Hollywood loves a sequel. In fact the only thing Hollywood loves more than a sequel is setting up a sequel. From leaving unresolved threads at the end of a movie to blatantly ending on a cliffhanger, there are more movies than ever that want audiences to part with money a few years later for the follow up.

However, not all movies manage to make it to another outing. Be it diminishing box office returns or the creative team behind the movie not being able to agree on how the sequel should look, these films failed to make the sequel they promised us.

After leaving everyone guessing how these following films would come back after their tantalising teaser, the inability to deliver on the promise of a sequel was a crushing disappointment to many.

While many of these films may eventually have sequels, prospects looks bleak that we will see Joseph Gordon-Levitt don Robin's leggings or see a Furiosa solo outing any time soon...

10. District 9

Dark Knight Rises Joseph Gordon Levitt
TriStar Pictures

District 9 is a strange hybrid of a film; a blend of a mockumentary, a grisly body horror and a futuristic action film but with a strong whiff of social satire throughout. The plot is the only thing that is straightforward as we follow Wikus van de Merwe, a lovable and bumbling bureaucrat in charge of rehousing aliens in South Africa, while he slowly transforms into one of the 'fookin prawns' himself.

At the end of the film after Wilkus has gone off the radar, last seen halfway between prawn and human, Wilkus's wife reveals someone has left a flower made out of scrap metal on her doorstep. We are then shown Wilkus fully transformed into a prawn making said flowers waiting for his prawn friend 'Christopher Johnson' who promised he would return in three years time to reverse Wikus's alien transformation.

However, a decade later talks of a sequel remain just talks with no massive rush to follow up the journey of Wilkus the human prawn hybrid and the question of whether he was eventually cured. The film even finished with the ominous text 'District 10 now houses 2.5 million aliens and continues to grow...'. We are still awaiting answers.

Contributor

An avid cinephile, love Trainspotting (the film, not the hobby), like watching bad films ironically (The Room, Cats) and hate my over-reliance on brackets (they’re handy for a quick aside though).