10 Movie Sequels That Completely Flipped The Original

Look, movie sequels are by nature a tricky business. No one wants a mere retread of the original, and since their inception the dreaded shameless cash-in sequel has been the bane of cinemagoers everywhere.

When a film doesn’t diverge enough from formula it can set up a franchise for failure, as evidenced by a string of Friday the 13th flicks so forgettably similar that even an expert like this very writer might manage to mix up two instalments in an earlier article and still somehow never live it down according to the comments section (yes, okay, he goes to Hell in part nine and not part five, point conceded).

That said, if a film changes too much about what made its predecessor so appealing it can easily become such a different beast that the necessary connective tissue required to build an enduring franchise is lost. Just look at The Exorcist 2: The Heretic, which is nothing like the first film due to being terrible, and its successor Exorcist 3, which is far better but also nothing like either of the preceding instalments, resulting in a franchise with two versions of its fourth instalment—both of them unwatchable.

It’s a risky move to rewrite the formula of a winning series, but on occasion this rejig can be exactly the necessary injection of energy to keep a franchise alive. Whether great, awful, or neither, here are ten cases of sequels which flipped the script on their predecessors.

Out of all the films which made it to this list, Rambo may be the most striking case of two divergent treatments for the same themes meeting in one franchise. The first Rambo film was a slow, thoughtful, and deliberately dark meditation on the human cost of war. Following the titular veteran as he waged a campaign of retribution against a small town’s corrupt cops, First Blood was an unsparing depiction of America’s abandonment of its veterans, the country’s horrific legacy in Vietnam, and the shattered lives left behind by the bloody two decade invasion, ending with a tearful Rambo breaking down as he comes to terms with his complicity in his country’s atrocities.

Fast forward a few years and the film found itself a sequel in the form of First Blood: Part 2. A rare triple Razzie winner for Worst Picture, Actor, and Screenplay, the jingoistic macho fantasy saw a now-indestructible Rambo slaughter his way through innumerable faceless Viet Cong and Soviet soldiers, proving the US was right to attack Vietnam after all and erasing any evidence of a moral compass from its gung ho nationalism.

We all love some onscreen ultraviolence, but when the Washington Post is calling your film “the cinematic equivalent of carpet bombing” and its predecessor criticized real-life campaigns of the same, it might time to reconsider the target of the flick’s indiscriminate gunfire.