8 Movies You Wrongly Thought Were Sequels

7. Home Alone 3

Can you say cynical cash grab? Home Alone 3 is less a straight sequel to the excellent Macaulay Culkin movies and more a completely unrelated movie with one basic similarity with the Home Alone brand name slapped on it.

The "sequel" manages to lose everything that made the original good - the McCallister clan (and Kevin chiefly) and the Wet Bandits - and replaces them with a dumb plot about a lost cloaking chip, four hitmen (without the charisma in Joe Pesci's little finger between them) and a precocious lead child who is not Macaulay Culkin. He's not even a bargain basement Culkin.

But being bad doesn't disqualify it from being a sequel: it's the complete lack of any tie to the other films other than the vague idea of home invasion and traps. And it's that kind of tenuous relationship that would suggest you could claim that the Saw movies are set in the Home Alone universe. Or the original Purge. Or Funny Games. You can't just have plot similarities and expect anyone to just accept it being a sequel without all the other qualifiers.