10 Movie Cliffhangers That Were Ignored In The Sequel
We still don't know why Neo had powers outside of The Matrix.
In movies a cliffhanger is typically intended to leave the viewer hanging on with bated breath to witness the outcome in the sequel, while feverishly speculating with fellow fans during the interim.
Take Avengers: Infinity War, the climax of which shocked the world and left everyone frantically discussing how Avengers: Endgame would resolve it. This is the level of hype and impact every filmmaker wants their cliffhanger to generate, though of course very few do.
But even a functionally decent cliffhanger can keep fans invested in future installments, whether the hero's life is hanging precariously in the balance or not.
However, there are also those films that pose a tantalising final mystery only for the next entry into the series to end up ignoring it entirely.
This can be for a number of reasons: perhaps the filmmakers decided it wasn't a storytelling avenue they wanted to pursue, maybe too much time passed between sequels, or it's possible that the fanbase themselves vehemently rejected what the cliffhanger was teasing.
Whatever the reason, these 10 movie cliffhangers were categorically sacked off in the sequel, for better or worse...
10. Tommy Jarvis Becomes The New Jason - Friday The 13th: A New Beginning
The fifth Friday the 13th film, A New Beginning, concluded with the frankly insane cliffhanger that one of the few people to both survive and defeat Jason Voorhees, Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd), had seemingly become the new Jason.
After Tommy kills Jason copycat Roy Burns (Dick Wieand), the final scene sees him recovering in the hospital, and when Pam (Melanie Kinnaman) enters his room, he sneaks up on her with a knife while wearing Jason's iconic hockey mask.
The intent, clearly, was to have the real Jason stay dead and keep the franchise going with Tommy taking up his mantle, but the idea caused such a stink with audiences that the sequel under-performed at the box office, and so this thread was abandoned for the next movie.
Instead the sixth film, Jason Lives, totally forgot that cliffhanger and kicked off with Tommy (Thom Mathews) accidentally resurrecting Jason while attempting to kill him once and for all.
Surprisingly Tommy actually survives yet another encounter with Jason, and though this was the last time he was seen in any of the movies, canonically speaking he's still very much alive - and, er, definitely not a killer.