28 Movies That Tried To Get Away With Changing VERY Key Plot Points In The Sequel
You've probably experienced this before: There's a movie you love with a killer ending, and you're psyched to hear there's gonna be a sequel.
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But then, the writers completely flip the script — the sequel kills off all your favorite characters, completely changes their backstories, or pretends like the other movie never happened.
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I knew I wasn't the only one who finds this extremely frustrating. Reddit user u/Final_Read_3430 asked a handful of movie franchise fans, "What's a sequel that tries to undo what the previous film did?" and jeez, did they have a lot of opinions.
Here are 28 sequels that tried to undo the previous film.
****EXTREME SPOILER ALERT****
1.In Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The T-800 sacrifices himself to prevent the wrong people from getting their hands on his technology, but Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines shows they still figure out a way to end the world.
“The future isn’t set...
"So anyway, judgment day happened, and fuck you. Lol, I hated that."
"I always thought the message there got fuzzy. They keep saying the future isn't set, etc. But, don't all the movies prove that judgment day cannot be avoided?"
2.Just when you expect High School Musical 2 to show a brand new humble side of Sharpay, the pinked-out diva reverts to her old ways and becomes the high school villain once again.
"The first one ends with Sharpay becoming a better person, and then High School Musical 2 is like, 'Surprise! No, she didn't.'"
3.In Pitch Perfect 3, after graduating and moving on with their lives, all the women suddenly abandon their post-college careers so they can reform their a cappella group.
"Pitch Perfect 3 did the protagonist dirty. Beca spends two movies motivated by her career aspirations to become a record producer, only for her to quit her dream job at the start of the movie, ending with her becoming a professional singer."
4.Everything from the first Evil Dead is ignored, and in Evil Dead II, Ash and Linda discover the cabin and the evil book for the very first time.
"Evil Dead II retold the entire story of Evil Dead in the first half minus most of the characters."
"That's what I never understood — was Evil Dead II a remake or a sequel?"
5.Kingsman: The Golden Circle brings back Colin Firth's character Harry Hart after he was shot point blank in the face and killed off in the previous movie.
"The Golden Circle kills off all the British supporting characters in the first movie, tries to undo Colin Firth's death in the first one, takes the focus to the American branch instead of the British one, and the movie ends with destroying the Kingsman branch and replacing it with a Statesman branch in the UK."
6.In Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, we learn that Rey's Sith granddaddy "somehow returned" and kept it a secret from the entire galaxy while building a new massive army.
"Somehow, Palpatine survived."
"I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that professional Hollywood scriptwriters decided on 'somehow' as an explanation. Like seriously, that’s it? I could’ve taken five minutes and pulled something more coherent out of my ass. I cannot believe that made it into the final cut of that awful movie."
7.In Resident Evil: Extinction, after hope for civilization was teased, Alice is inexplicably separated from the survivors of Raccoon City, and most of the world becomes a barren desert wasteland.
"The third film literally nukes everything in the second film. Tons of characters are gone with a complete change of setting. Literally, the whole world ends, and it's basically offscreen — just described in a narration text dump. It ends with the implication that an army of super-powered Alices are going to take down Umbrella."
"It's honestly kind of amazing how each movie manages to completely forget major plot points from the previous movies. It's especially astonishing since Paul W. S. Anderson wrote and directed almost all of them. It's like he doesn't even watch his own movies."
8.Brahms: The Boy II brings back the shattered, lifeless doll in perfect condition to reveal that it's alive with the ability to possess people.
"Brahms: The Boy II reversed the twist of 'The Boy' where it's revealed the doll wasn't alive, but a man was hiding in the walls of the home."
"My husband and I watched the first one and thought it was great — a nice change from the usual. Then, we watched the second one, and I don't think I have ever been angrier at having watched a movie."
9.Highlander II: The Quickening completely changes the history of Connor MacLeod and the immortals into alien beings, rewriting everything established in the previous film.
"The first Highlander was so definitive in its ending that any sequel basically undoes what occurs in the original."
"HIGHLANDER 2 NEVER HAPPENED. At least, that’s what we diehard Highlander fans would say, reflexively, when asked. It is the most egregious example EVER of a sequel completely DESTROYING the entire premise of the original (pretty great) movie. It is an abomination of a movie. If it existed. Which it shouldn’t."
10.In Blade II, Whistler returns as a vampire after clearly ending his own life to prevent transforming into a vampire in the first movie.
"In Blade, Whistler dies in the last act to prevent from becoming a vampire. In the second movie, they retcon this so that he actually survived, as a vampire, and then Blade just cures him, so he's a human again."
11.In Alien: Covenant, after the last survivor, Elizabeth Shaw, escapes, we learn that she met her end before the next adventure began.
"While I really liked the movie, I couldn't stand that Shaw was just totally discarded and killed offscreen. We had this cool concept of a woman who lost so much and still held steadfast in her pursuit of knowledge that she was willing to go to the home planet of humanity's creators even though she had already experienced the worst that they had to offer."
12.In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, after most of the Autobots claimed it's their first time on Earth in the original Transformers, we discover they actually have a history with earthlings that dates back to thousands of years ago.
"Every single one of the Transformers movies rewrote the history with Earth and whether or not humans knew of their existence:
"The first movie had them visiting Earth for what is presumably the first time in the present day, save for Megatron, who has been frozen for an unknown period.
"Then, the second movie stated that the original Autobots, the Primes, battled the Fallen on their own on Earth 17,000 years ago, leaving behind a massive machine hidden in one of the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Also, Jetfire was hiding as an SR-71 in a museum for who knows how long, probably decades?"
13.In Cars 3, Mater is no longer a high-tech spy with impeccable deductive reasoning like in Cars 2. He reverts back to the old simple, tow truck.
"Cars 3 ABSOLUTELY pretends that Cars 2 (where Mater is an international spy) never happened. They even released short 'Cars Toons' where Mater tells tall tales about all the amazing things he’s done that essentially retcons Cars 2 into being a very long 'Cars Toon.'”
"If Cars 3 taught me anything, the less Mater, the better."
14.Alien 3, the survivors from the previous film are killed in their sleep by a stowaway alien, and a sleeping Ripley manages to get away just in the nick of time.
"Here’s the survivors who struggle so much to survive the previous movie. Now just lemme kill most of them in the intro credits because we couldn’t be bothered to fit them in the script.”
15.In Now You See Me 2, the backstory of Lionel Shrike is changed from amateur magician to legendary secret society leader, and the "supposed" villain was his best friend all along.
"It rewrites Lionel Schrike as a master magician when the first one keeps calling him a middling-at-best magician who was out of his depth.
"It also rewrites Thaddeus as a good guy who is possibly running 'The Eye.'"
"Yes. The first film sort of attempts to imply they are doing tricks, but by the third act, they are just doing impossible shit. In the second film, it is like they didn't even try and just said anything goes."
16.Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me turns Vanessa, Austin's partner and lover from the first film, into a robotic assassin in the movie's first five minutes.
"The opening undoes almost all of his character development and growth to make him a single ladies' man again."
"IMO, two should've kept his marriage alive and had fun with 1990s Austin and Vanessa going back to the Swinging '60s and him not liking it anymore because of having evolved. Plenty more fish-out-of-water fun to be found in that reversal and in challenging and strengthening his new life from the first one."
17.In the first half of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, most of the main characters from the previous film are killed off, bringing the new heroes back to square one against Freddy Krueger.
"A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master killed all of the survivors from Dream Warriors in the first 10 minutes of the movie."
"This is a shame because Dream Warriors is arguably the best Nightmare movie after the original."
18.In Don't Breathe 2, the murderous and predatory Blind Man is now a play-father to a child, and we're supposed to sympathize with him?
"In Don't Breathe 2, they forgot the 'Blind Man' was trying to impregnate a girl he kept locked in his basement and made him a sympathetic character who was trying to save a little girl."
19.After their previous heroics, Ghostbusters II has everyone return to mundane jobs and unable to continue their work as Ghostbusters.
"The film starts with the Ghostbusters having disbanded back to mundane careers, society largely not believing in ghosts again somehow and treating the GBs as con artists, and Dana Barrett not being Peter's girlfriend — all things that were SPECTACULARLY overcome in the first film yet somehow fell apart in the five years after it and have to be achieved all over again in Ghostbusters II."
20.Resident Evil: Afterlife basically says, "Whoops!" and immediately kills off the entire army of super-powered Alices that were rescued at the end of the previous film.
"The fourth film begins with all the super-powered Alices dying and the 'main' Alice getting de-powered, so she's just a regular human now. It abandons almost all the characters and setting of the third film."
21.The Return of Jafar brings back Genie and resets the gang's adventures after Aladdin clearly freed Genie from magical captivity in the first movie.
"Other than the fact that they didn’t get Robin Williams back, it’s like they hit the reset button on every bit of character growth and plot advancement from the first."
22.The Bourne Supremacy quickly erases the happy ending of the previous film and kills off Jason Bourne's love interest in the first five minutes.
"The first one ended so beautifully. The second undid everything in the first few minutes and completely reversed the happy ending at the end of the first movie."
23.Final girl Julie somehow survived the previous film's fatal ending and acts like it never happened in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.
"Jennifer Love Hewitt was attacked at the end of the first in jump-scare fashion. I can’t even find an explanation on why it wasn’t seemingly ever alluded to in the film's plot. I mean, the first ends with her getting attacked by a returning killer...then she just wins tickets to an island resort?
24.G.I. Joe: Retaliation gets rid of all the Joes except Snake Eyes, and replaces them with an entirely new set of soldiers.
"G.I. Joe: Retaliation jettisons nearly all the characters of the first movie, killing off the lead of the previous movie (Duke, played by Channing Tatum) in the first reel and writing off everyone else except Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, building a completely new story from previously-unseen Joes, centered on Roadblock (played by Dwayne Johnson)."
25.In the first minutes of American Psycho II: All American Girl, a random victim manages to break free, kill off the main character, and replace him.
"American Psycho II literally kills the main character of the first movie offscreen and has nothing to do with American Psycho in any way."
26.In the first Crank, Chev Chelios plummets to his death, but then in Crank 2: High Voltage, they take it all back and impossibly bring him back to life for the sequel.
"He dies at the end of Crank by falling off a skyscraper/helicopter. This is retconned in the second one that he only ends up in the hospital because of the adrenaline. Insanity."
27.In Incredibles 2, just when we expect a full-fledged family of crime-fighting superheroes from the last film, the parents immediately establish they don't want their kids involved.
"Incredibles 2 took 15 years to make, picks up right where the first movie left off, and shows us a family that learned, like, zero lessons from the previous adventure."
28.In Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Jacob's memory is taken away like all the other muggles, but only his love manages to break the curse.
"The Crimes of Grindelwald undid Jacob's mind wipe from the end of the first movie."
