It’s always a surprise when a hit movie wins rave reviews from critics and/or makes a ton of money at the box office, only to be left alone as a one-and-done effort. We’ve become so used to success equating sequels, that it’s more of a shock when a hugely popular and even more profitable title doesn’t spawn follow-ups, prequels, reboots, spinoffs, and all the rest.
That’s not to say every blockbuster, sleeper smash, or well-received genre film necessarily needs to be mined for all the content possible, but it does seem to be the approach that Hollywood takes more often than not. There’s a combination of shock, surprise, and relief when it happens, and it makes a fitting counterpoint to the precision-engineered franchise-starters that fail to complete the task they were created for.
Redditors have been diving deep into the standalone rabbit hole to throw up some flicks they were genuinely surprised or relieved didn’t end up giving rise to a multi-film IP that watered down what made the opener so special, even if some of the suggestions have flirted with the concept at least once or twice.
The Goonies doesn’t need to be continued, remade, or rebooted, but that endeavor looks to have ended following the passing of Richard Donner. It’s been nearly 20 years and the occasional talk of a Dodgeball 2 rears its head, but that ship has almost certainly sailed, too.
Christopher Nolan was never going to deliver an Inception redux, James Cameron admitted True Lies 2 was taken off the table in the wake of 9/11, while Karl Urban’s Dredd is a fixture of these conversations. Not that they all needed to exist, but one or two of them wouldn’t have gone amiss.