5 Sequels That Came Out 20 Years Later (And Were Actually Worth The Wait)

This week sees the release of Independence Day: Resurgence, the long-mooted sequel to Roland Emmerich's flag-waving explosion-fest, and it's got a lot of questions surrounding it. Biggest of all is how we ever let ourselves fall out of love with Jeff Goldblum, but there's also the question of whether a follow-up to a film firmly rooted in the carefree mid-nineties will fly in a post-9/11 world where even the most hopeful superhero is a moping murderer. We'll have to wait and see, but it's worth remembering this isn't the first time a film has turned up twenty years after the fact.

Of course, most late-in-the-day sequels end up pretty cack, with the returning creatives unable to recapture the initial magic and the film in general too enamoured with the original to do anything fresh. Dumb And Dumber To, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, The Rage: Carrie 2; all movies that prove the phrase "twenty years in the making" is far from a stamp of quality.

However, every now and then there's a film that bucks the trend. There’s no real rule about how to make such a gap work - some films choose to embrace the passage of time, revelling in the legacy of the original, where others simply accept that a couple of decades have passed and get on with it - but these five movies actually did it.

The Previous Movie: Predator 2 (1990)

The Belated Sequel: Predators (2010)

The Gap: 20 years

The Predator franchise may bleed, but it seems impossible to kill – with Shane Black’s reboot The Predator making waves online and a massive extended universe of material (they’re called the Yautja, apparently), it’s clear the metal-masked vagina face will never go away.

That being said, there was a whole twenty years between movies in the main Predator franchise. Ever since Predator 2 and its xenomorph skull easter egg, Fox were obsessed with having the skilled hunter fight the perfect organism, to the point where they halted development of a Ridley Scott-directed, James Cameron-scripted Alien 5, spent the better part of ten years trying to get an AVP movie off the ground and refused to accept their mistake and made a sequel in 2007 to the delight of only the most deranged masochist.

When the dust had finally settled, the studio realised perhaps it was better to keep things separate (although don’t be surprised if the success of shared universes convince them to have another go at some point). Ridley Scott finally got to make his God-bothering Alien origin and Robert Rodriquez made Predators, a film that gets an unfairly bad rap; A neat latter-day expansion of the original that keeps the ethos and ups to characters and danger, it’s as good a throwback as you can expect.