6. It Has A Oh, Then This Happened Opening
What I hate most with sequels is when they force exposition on the audience when the previous left so much open for exploration. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps had Gordon Gekko coming out of prison, but it wasnt from Bud Foxs actions in the first film. Instead, a whole new villain with a complicated back story with Gekko was created that nullified the original's wholesome ending. And Toy Story 3 ignored its rich heritage and created its own iconography (Woody riding horse-like Andy) to be significant at the climax. For the most part The Dark Knight Rises avoided this. It used what had been shown in the previous films - Ras Al Ghul had a wife he lost, the pearls were important to Bruce - and embellished on them, creating a greater sense of unity than trilogies that are planned out from the beginning. But not everything was perfect. The whole clean energy story, with seemingly long standing business rival Daggett, while topical, had little call back to the previous films and Bruces exile, assumed from the trailers to be relating to the vilifying of Batman, ended up being much more about the nuclear threat than his caped days.