10 Movies That Accidentally Set Up Sequels
4. The Descent
Neil Marshall's modest 2005 horror film The Descent had "one and done" written all over it, especially if you go by the original ending included in the movie's UK release, where protagonist Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) is revealed to have never escaped the creature-infested cave system.
By his own admission in a recent interview, Marshall had never considered the idea of a sequel and conceived the movie from the ground-up as a single, self-contained experience:
"I could revisit [the world of The Descent] but with that one it was kind of intended to be a one-off. And then the sequel got made anyway."
Indeed, a sequel got made largely due to Lionsgate's decision to cut the bleak final coda from the American release, instead ending the film with Sarah escaping - which, in the UK version, is revealed to be an hallucination.
Test audiences in the U.S. found the original ending too depressing, and so it was snipped.
But when The Descent became a surprise box office hit - grossing $57.1 million worldwide against a mere £3.5 million budget - it was decided to confirm the sanitised U.S. ending as canon and proceed with a sequel.
Yet with Marshall returning only as executive producer, it wasn't much surprising that the sequel failed to replicate its predecessor's success either critically or commercially.