The 50 Most Disappointing Movie Sequels of All Time

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines had a lot working against it before the cameras even started rolling. The first two Terminator movies were the brainchild of James Cameron. He wrote them, directed them, and oversaw every detail of their production. He’s also a genius that’s basically never made a bad movie. But Cameron wasn’t involved with Terminator 3. The film also didn’t have Linda Hamilton or Edward Furlong on board to play Sarah and John Connor. The only thing it had from the first two movies (besides a cameo from Earl Boen as Dr. Peter Silberman) was the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger. And as we’ve learned from Batman and Robin, End of Days, The Sixth Day, and many other turkeys, Schwarzenegger alone doesn’t guarantee a great movie. And this is far from a great movie. It’s a reprise of T2, where yet another advanced Terminator comes back in time, played by Kristanna Loken, and John Connor (now Nick Stahl) has to find a way to stay alive with help from another T-850 Terminator, played by Schwarzenegger. There’s almost no scene worth remembering up until the very end when a nuclear war begins and John Connor fulfills his fate by taking command. It’s a genuinely chilling moment, but it can’t make up for the nearly two hours that precede it. To be fair, nothing was ever going to top T2. It’s one of the greatest sequels in Hollywood history, rivaled only by The Godfather II, but Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines doesn’t even come close.

The dance sequences in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever are some of the most iconic images in the history of film. But they’re just a few fleeting minutes in an otherwise dark movie about a Brooklyn teenager (played by John Travolta) desperate to improve his lot in life. Gene Siskel considered it the greatest movie in the history of Hollywood. By the time we catch up with Travolta’s Tony Manero character in 1983’s Staying Alive, he’s a waiter who dreams of Broadway stardom. Sylvester Stallone is the director, and he invited his brother Frank to contribute songs to the soundtrack. And with all due respect to Frank Stallone, his work doesn’t exactly stand up to the Bee Gees. (They have some deeply unmemorable songs of their own on the soundtrack.) But bad music is far from the biggest problem in Staying Alive. There’s simply no heart to the story, and Manero finds himself acting in an abysmal Broadway musical that feels like a Flock of Seagulls fever dream. “Staying Alive is a sequel with no understanding of what made its predecessor work,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times. “The first film was funny and touching, powered by a phenomenally successful score. This one is clumsy, mean-spirited, and amazingly unmusical.”

With the very big exception of the Indiana Jones movies, Steven Spielberg has largely resisted the lure of sequels throughout his long career. He could have made a fortune directing follow-up movies to Jaws, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but he knew they’d never live up to the originals, and that his time would be better spent on new projects. But 1993’s Jurassic Park was such a mega-hit that he went against his better judgment and agreed to direct 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park. It’s an adaptation of a novel that Michael Crichton reluctantly churned out in 1995 so that this very movie could exist. It’s about another island where the Jurassic Park dinosaurs were bred. Jeff Goldblum heads there alongside Julianne Moore and Vince Vaughn. The dinos attack. People die. In the end, a T. rex is set loose in San Diego. It all feels very humdrum and lacks any sense of wonder found in the original. It made a ton of money, and they’re in the midst of creating a seventh Jurassic Park right now, but only the first one is a genuinely good movie. The sequels are all varying degrees of terrible. 

When comedy sequels truly work, which is exceedingly rare, they come out within a couple of years of the original, and are assembled by the same creative team. Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and Addams Family Values are the gold standard here. They hit theaters within two years of their predecessors, and the key behind-the-scenes players (Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon for Bill & Ted, Barry Sonnenfeld for Addams Family) were back. Bad Santa 2 came out 13 years after Bad Santa, without the help of original director Terry Zwigoff or writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. They did have Bad Santa himself, Billy Bob Thortnon, along with Tony Cox as his conniving partner, and even former child actor Brett Kelly reprising his Santa-obsessed Thurman Merman character. The old gang reunites to pull off another Christmas heist, but the dirty jokes just don’t land in this one. “There’s a going-through-the-motions vibe to the whole affair,” wrote Rolling Stone’s David Fear. “The original believed in its sodden, everyone-sucks with every ounce of its hardened, pitch-black heart — ironically, its horribleness made it that much more humanistic (and hilarious). The sequel is closer to fool’s coal: You can blow the thin patina of painted darkness off it with a breeze and find there’s nothing underneath.”

To be very clear, the original Teen Wolf is far from a great movie. But Michael J. Fox had more than enough Back to the Future-era charm to pull off the role as a nerd turned werewolf who becomes a high school basketball star and unlikely ladies man. Sadly, Fox is nowhere to be seen in the sequel. It stars Jason Bateman as the cousin of his character. He goes to college, discovers he’s also a werewolf, and uses his powers to win boxing matches. “College Boxer Transforms Into Werewolf” should have generated headlines all across the globe, but it’s treated as little more than a regional curiosity in this horrid movie. “The pacing is near-cataleptic and the movie’s intended comic highlight is a frog fight in the biology lab,” wrote Michael Wilmington in the Los Angeles Times. “Isn’t that just what you’re dying to see and hear? Bad dialogue, lugubriously paced; awful jokes about werewolves, and guffawing actors churlishly hurling around a lot of little frogs?”

If any movie franchise was poised to create a cinematic universe, it was Men in Black. There’s literally an entire galaxy of wacky aliens to explore, and a small army of Men in Black spread across Earth to battle them. If Sony handled this IP properly, we could be 10 seasons into a Men in Black cable show, eight seasons into an animated program, and somewhere around spinoff movie 12 or 13. But their first attempt to move beyond the Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones movie trilogy was 2019’s Men in Black: International, starring Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Rebecca Ferguson, Liam Neeson, and Kumail Nanjiani. It centers around a London Men in Black office, and the search for a powerful weapon hidden somewhere on the planet. It grossed just enough to possibly break even, but not nearly enough to justify another one of these things. ”It has been 17 years since Men in Black was a hot property, and the intervening gap has done nothing to revive interest in it,” wrote film critic James Berardinelli. “Whoever spearheaded this half-hearted resurrection should be fitted with a golden parachute. For those who remember the Men in Black movies fondly, stick with your memories. Seeing this latest installment is more likely to degrade than enhance them.”

When it comes to comedy sequels, the temptation to simply recreate the exact structure of the original movie, along with all of the signature gags, is just too tough for most filmmakers to ignore. That’s why the genius trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker opted against creating a sequel to Airplane! so they could devote their time to developing the TV series Police Squad. That show — which eventually morphed into the Naked Gun movie franchise — is also why Leslie Nielsen wasn’t free to appear in Airplane 2: The Sequel. It did reunite Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, and Lloyd Bridges, but writer-director Ken Finkleman simply doesn’t have the same comedic instincts as Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. (His prior movie was Grease 2. Need we say more?) He wrote a screenplay about a lunar shuttle headed to the moon, but it’s basically just a straight remake of Airplane! minus about 500 laughs. The only good thing about the whole fiasco is that Naked Gun exists because Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker were smart enough to avoid this movie. You won’t see either of the Naked Gun sequels on this list. Unlike Airplane 2: The Sequel, they’re both extremely funny.

If we were making a list of the best sequels in Hollywood history, Lethal Weapon 2 would be near the top of the list. The third one was slightly underwhelming, but the series didn’t crap out until the fourth one arrived in 1998. By this point, Joe Pesci and Rene Russo were part of the Lethal Weapon family along with series stars Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Chris Rock and Jet Li came on board for the fourth chapter, cramming in so many big names they barely fit on the poster. In this one, Riggs and Murtaugh battle an Asian counterfeiter/slave trader. Glover is beyond “too old for this shit” by this one, considering that his character planned on retiring from the police force a decade earlier, and it feels like everyone is just going through the motions, and counting how much money they’re making per second. The script was nowhere near ready when filming started, and that’s clear in most every frame. “I felt like Lethal Weapon 4 was outtakes [from the previous movies],” wrote critic Roger Ebert, “stuff they didn’t use earlier, pieced together into a movie that doesn’t really, in its heart, believe it is necessary.”

The first Iron Man movie forever changed Hollywood. It marked the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the start of a broader superhero fixation that grips the industry to this day, and a new dawn for the career of Robert Downey Jr. But when it came time to make a second Iron Man movie in 2010, just two years after the original, Marvel was still fine-tuning its movie operation. Justin Theroux took over as screenwriter for this one, and he cobbled together a convoluted tale where Tony Stark is forced to confront a serious health scare, a powerful new Russian enemy portrayed by Mickey Rourke, and pressures that came after the public learned of his true identity. “Everything fun and terrific about Iron Man, a mere two years ago, has vanished with its sequel,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt. “In its place, Iron Man 2 has substituted noise, confusion, multiple villains, irrelevant stunts, and misguided story lines. A film series that started out with critical and commercial success will have to settle for only the latter with this sequel.” 

The initial announcement that Natalie Portman was returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder was greeted with real excitement. She’d been AWOL since 2013’s Thor: The Dark World, despite playing a pretty big role in the saga as Jane Foster, Thor’s astrophysicist girlfriend. Excitement grew when fans learned she was going to finally wield the hammer herself and take on the role of the Mighty Thor. But then word slipped out that the character was battling stage 4 cancer. The script tries to balance out this colossal bummer with an endless series of comic sequences that creates a very odd overall tone. If you don’t believe us, listen to Thor himself, Chris Hemworth: “I got caught up in the improv and the wackiness, and I became a parody of myself,” he told Vanity Fair this year. “I didn’t stick the landing.”

The first three Alien movies were directed by three of the best directors of their time: Ridley Scott, James Cameron, and David Fincher. The third one was a letdown, since Fincher was still a novice, the studio didn’t fully trust him, and the screenplay was never really finished. But it remains a David Fincher movie that’s intermittently innovative and interesting. The same can’t be said for 1997’s Alien Resurrection. It takes place on a military spaceship 200 years after Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley character died at the end of Alien 3. She’s cloned from a drop of her blood, and somehow her memories are intact. They also bring back the Xenomorph alien species, which is a very, very bad idea. (Haven’t these people heard about the events of the first three movies?) Needless to say, the Xenomorphs grow, reproduce, and start killing. Winona Ryder enters the story, and we eventually learn she’s a robot. Ripley once again batters the shit out of the Xenomorph, but haven’t we seen this all before? “This is a series whose inspiration has come, gone, and been forgotten,” wrote Roger Ebert. “I’m aliened out.”

For a while, it was popular to cite Spider-Man 3 as the low point of the franchise. But time has been somewhat kind to Emo Spider-Man and his Pete Wentz haircut, and a small cult (as well as endless memes) have grown around its weirdness. And even if you think Spider-Man 3 is a bloated sludge of a movie with too many villains, it’s clearly superior to The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which marked the premature end of the Andrew Garfield era. It’s the one where Jamie Foxx plays Electro, Paul Giamatti takes on the Rhino role, the Green Goblin returns, and Gwen (played by Emma Stone) falls to her death. This was the fifth Spider-Man movie in a 12-year period, and it all just feels like a rehash of things we’ve seen before, along with an effort to set up about six different spinoff movies and sequels. “The studios and the producers have to split the difference — between excellence and adequacy, between darkness and light, between seriousness and fun,” Wesley Morris wrote on Grantland. “The Amazing Spider-Man 2 might have been split too far. It doesn’t taste like anything.” 

The huge success of 1993’s The Fugitive meant a sequel was somewhat inevitable, even though any such project was basically doomed from the start. There was no logical way for Harrison Ford to be framed for a second murder, escape from the law, and get chased around again by Tommy Lee Jones. It would have been preposterous, and Ford was never going to sign on to such a thing. The only move was to send Jones’ Samuel Gerard character and his team of U.S. Marshals after another unjustly accused man. That’s what happened in 1998’s U.S. Marshals, where Wesley Snipes takes over for Harrison Ford as the man on the run. The movie was a modest hit, but it has aged terribly. Jones himself isn’t even willing to defend it these days. “The thing that drove The Fugitive was that we weren’t chasing just a normal doctor,” he told Rolling Stone in our 2023 oral history of The Fugitive. “Whatever we were doing, we were chasing Harrison Ford, and I think he was the engine of the movie. With U.S. Marshals, we had a different director, had a different approach, and it just wasn’t … the movie wasn’t as good as The Fugitive.” It’s impossible to argue with that. 

The Star Trek film franchise got off to an extremely shaky start with the snoozefest that is 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which just made 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan all the more stunning. Star Trek III: The Search For Spock was a minor letdown in 1984, but words can barely describe our love for 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. That’s the bonkers time-travel one with the whales that’s as fun to watch the 200th time as the first. Leonard Nimoy was given the chance to…