10 Movies You Totally Forgot Had Sequels

Sequels are very much a mixed bag. Some are made with the best intentions in order to advance the original story and tie up any loose ends, others clearly only have the purpose of being a quick cash grab without any real merit. There is an occasional rarity when a follow-up movie exceeds the original for having a compelling story telling and excellent creativity (Terminator 2: Judgment Day for one) and even a few of them become worth watching for how hilariously awful the content is (see Exorcist II: The Heretic or Jaws 4: The Revenge in you’re looking for a bad popcorn flick).

Failing sequels are often due to a new director/producer/writer in the works who doesn’t ‘understand’ the original film which is why the tone and genre drastically changes for the worse. On top of that, it’s difficult to reprise all the original actors and the director is forced to cast someone different for an already established character. And of course, they lose their unique imagery and become ugly as sin.

The collection of sequels in this list are victim to a lot of these problems but they’re also forgotten because of the lack of marketing and hype which helped the success of the original. It also doesn’t help that a lot of them are TV movies – they very seldom succeed anyway.

With the famous tagline “The Eighth Wonder of the World”, King Kong has become a renowned symbol of American movie culture, right up there with Godzilla for fictional monsters. He’s an original creation and not binded by any novella or ancient mythology which allows for plenty of creative freedom when making a story about the famous beast. Over the decades, King Kong has spawned out several movies, imitations, parodies, comics, video games and even managed to get a stage play.

The ongoing franchise all started in 1933 when Merian C. Cooper conceived the idea of the monstrous gorilla. The original story goes as a film crew travel to an exotic island and stumble across the colossal ape in which he is then captured and taken for public show. Despite its age, the original King Kong is still an exciting horror movie, showcasing a grand scale of set pieces and production values. It may also be one of the earliest examples of pre-dominantly using the image of The Empire State Building (a big deal at the time as the building was only completed a couple years beforehand).

Thanks to the success of the movie, it was followed up with a sequel named Son of Kong which was written, produced and released in the exact same year as the original film – that in itself should tell you what the quality of this secondary flick is like.

Son of Kong is a shift in genre as it’s more of adventure comedy and it sees the explorers have more sympathy for the gorilla in this movie. It’s easy to see why this film has gone under the radar – the original Kong movie is often eclipsed by more recent adaptations of the famous ape so why would its ancient sequel be any more eminent?