7 Movie Spinoffs That Were Better Than The Original

"Spinoff" much like "reshoots" and "reboot" has become a negative term within film fan circles, often taken to mean a franchise that has run out of ideas and wants to make a quick bit of cash by banking on one of its most popular characters.

And to be fair to everyone who sees a headline about an upcoming spinoff and emits a sad groan, there are a shockingly low amount of them that have actually managed to match or exceed the quality of the main entries in the series.

And even worse, most are just bad movies, full stop. The Nun, Minions, Men In Black: International, Annabelle, Elektra, The Scorpion King, Evan Almighty, X-Men Origins: Wolverine... clearly, crafting a brilliant spinoff is no easy task, so on the rare occasions when these efforts actually prove successful, they deserve to be given a huge amount of credit for - seemingly - doing the impossible.

So while it's true that most spinoffs are bad, a few genuinely great ones do exist, and a select few are even better than the films that they were based on.

People tend to forget that Get Him to the Greek is actually a spinoff of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and while it doesn't completely blow the original out of the water, it's a much more entertaining ride because it took the best character from that first film, and made him the central focus of the spinoff.

Get Him to the Greek follows wild British rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand, basically playing himself) whose declining career forces him to perform a comeback concert at the Greek Theatre. The movie is a kind of buddy-comedy with Brand and Jonah Hill trying to reach their destination in one piece, and because their chemistry is off the charts, the whole thing just works beautifully.

Brand also played Aldous in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a small role that was easily the highlight of that particular film. While it could have been a mistake to then give the character the spotlight here (in the same way that making the Minions the focal point of their own movie didn't really work) Brand's eccentricity never becomes completely overbearing because of Hill's everyman relatability balancing everything out.

The result is a pretty raunchy and wacky comedy - peppered with a few surprisingly touching moments, as well as a funny commentary on the music biz - and one that excels because of the strength of its two lead performances.