10 Movie Sequels That Changed Their Franchise's Genre
9. Rambo: First Blood Part II - Sombre Drama To Popcorn Action
The original First Blood starring Sylvester Stallone was so much more than the usual fare of musclebound action fluff that dominated the 80's blockbuster scene.
Quiet, meditative, and somber for 75% of its run time, First Blood chose to paint John Rambo's time in Vietnam - experience that was typically used as a quick shortcut to explain the everyman hero's abilities - as a brutal, life altering time that haunts him every day, and the people of small town America as apathetic at best, and caustic at worst, looking to take out their anger at a war that they feel should never have been fought, on the soldier who never wanted to fight to begin with.
It's a brutally honest depiction of PTSD, 70's era politics, and the role the common man unwittingly plays in an unjust, corrupt world.
Yeah, none of that carried over to the next movie. Or the next. Or the next. Leaving behind its somber tone and deconstructionist approach to 80's action movies, First Blood instead... became an 80's action movie. All the way down to Rambo going back to Vietnam to essentially win it for really real this time.
And yet despite this, the shift in genres feels oddly natural when you watch the films back to back. The quality may not be the same, but in terms of shifting a franchise from one genre to another, it did it about as effectively as it could.