Terrible sequels

[payn]

X2 still stands (despite the director) as one of my favourite Superhero films, so X-Men 3 is definitely a precipitous drop in quality for me.

Agreed.

Amazing Spider-Man 2, I still like Andrew Garfield more than Tobey Maguire and so between ASM2 and Spider-man 3, I think I'll go for this one, although the difference in quality between Maguire's 2nd and 3rd is definitely greater than Garfield's 1st and 2nd.

Thats a good one. ASM2 is for sure on the list of worst supers flicks ever made.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I dont think 3 was a good movie, though I do marvel at its script. It's a really interesting story about the colony. I have no idea how it was sold as a good idea for a film in the Alien franchise.

Yeah it's basically straight up an Rogue Trader-era era Warhammer 40K story, to the point where if it wasn't for the long history of the scripts for Aliens 3 and the large amount we know about them, you might think that was inspiration (40K WAS the inspiration for Event Horizon, note, as confirmed by the director a while back).

The Kingsman: The Golden Circle

The Kingsman was a fun movie. Not a masterpiece, but besides a very weirdly placed joke near the end I can't think of anything I would change. The sequel, on the other hand, is the type of movie that gets worse the more you think about it.

This is a strong contender. We go from a genuinely fun movie to a truly offensively stupid one which reveals the director did not, in fact, understand his material, and just got lucky.

Personally my one would be The Dark Knight Rises.

The Dark Knight was a very good Batman movie, a pretty good movie period, featured great performances, a memorable script, and a plot that, for a superhero movie, was surprisingly plausible on its own merits (Joker's plan falls apart under examination, but the film is good at avoiding that - it's not blatant). It's also quite together and focused.

The Dark Knight Rises is an risible wet fart of a movie, which looks good, and has some nice action sequences, but is absolutely brain-damagingly stupid, filled with highly politicised and very odd ideas (which lean very hard in a specific direction which isn't really congruous with even some of the movie's other ideas), blatantly makes no sense on many levels, has a largely terrible script with clunky lines (only Bane gets much to say, and he started off Nolan's godawful trend of "it's fine if the audience can't hear/understand"), is wildly overstuffed with characters and ideas - and not even in a fun way, and is overlong and self-indulgent on top of all that.

It went from like a 9/10 (grading on an curve for action-y movies) to like a 4/10.

Re: whether we're talking about "worst sequel" or "worst movie that is a sequel", I feel like the quality of the previous movie must be considered. Otherwise we just trawl around the trash for a trash sequel to a trash movie. I don't think it's interesting to ask what is the worst movie that happens to be sequel. It is interesting to ask what movie is the worst sequel to the previous movie. I don't think it's just quality either - some sequels completely betray the themes and ideas of the original - Starship Troopers 2 has been mentioned, for example. Robocop 3 is a truly terrible movie and completely betrays all the ideas of Robocop (Robocop 2 is bad but doesn't do that). Die Hard 2 is a pretty good movie, but McClaine is kind of a Big Damn Hero in it which is very distinct from the guy who was barely surviving in Die Hard.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Come on you apes, you wanna live forever? With masterful lines like this, the first movie in the franchise stole my heart. The follow-on movies, not so much. Has Jonny Rico done anything else? For that matter, has any of them?

Denise Richards and, to a lesser extent, Dina Meyer had careers away from Starship Troopers. The movie also starred Neil Patrick Harris, Clancy Brown, Jake Busey, Michael Ironside and Rue McClanahan.

It was only really Casper Van Dien who went down with the (star)ship.

 

[Jadeite]

Spiderman 3 and X-Men 3 were disappointing, but I rewatchted them a few years ago and they aren't that bad, just overloaded. Matrix Reloaded and Revolution are also still watchable.
I have yet to watch a worse Superhero movie than Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. And I liked the first Ghost Rider movie. I haven't seen Catwoman, though.
As for James Bond, I prefer Tomorrow never dies to Golden Eye (but agree on the later Brosnan movies) and think that No Time to Die is far worse than Quantum of Hope.

 

[Gladius Legis]

Godfather 3 comes to mind!

I'm just glad the director's cut that came out not too long ago dropped the 3 off the title and renamed it Coda. Now we don't have to pretend it's an integral part of the story with the first two.

(Coincidentally, Coda is at least a much better paced experience than the original cut, though still not what I would call a good movie.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I am very pleased to see public opinion turning away from pretending Dark Knight Rises was good.

 

[MGibster]

3. For the love of all that is holy, can't directors (especially ones that were just given an open checkbook and free rein) just release the actual cut of the movie as, you know, the movie?

Unfortunately that's now always up to the director.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I am very pleased to see public opinion turning away from pretending Dark Knight Rises was good.

Yeah I was reflecting on this in another thread, I think if you have a good director with a strong track record and a movie that's pretty, has decent SFX, and decent sound/music, I think for a lot of people it's genuinely hard to come out and say "That was bad" (I don't critique people for this, I think it's kind of natural). The friend I went to see Prometheus with spent like, the entire journey back trying to justify that it was a good movie, and I hadn't even pressed the point, I'd intentionally stopped arguing a while before, just expressed my opinion that it was pretty bad when we left the theatre. Felt like he was mostly pontificating for his own benefit. But more recently we were talking terrible movies and he brought up Prometheus, and mentioned he'd tried to watch it again, and it hadn't gone well. And I think that's what happens with a lot of people leading to adjustments of opinions - they go back to watch a movie and whoa, it's way nowhere near as good as they remembered. Often fairly recent movies too.

 

[Vael]

There's also, I find, a bit of a high from seeing it in the theaters. No pause button, no checking social media and the ... event of being in a movie theater still changes the atmosphere. I liked Star Trek Into Darkness when I saw it in theaters. It wasn't great, but the cast were engaging, the sights were pretty ... and at the time I felt some self-serious Trekkies needed a bit of fun and actually admired the temerity of flipping around the Wrath of Khan beats in the film.

... Let's just say that aside from "cast was engaging" ... none of those are current opinions are ones I hold. Well, that and that some Trekkies take Trek too seriously. It's a bad movie.

 

[Jahydin]

I'm just glad the director's cut that came out not too long ago dropped the 3 off the title and renamed it Coda. Now we don't have to pretend it's an integral part of the story with the first two.

(Coincidentally, Coda is at least a much better paced experience than the original cut, though still not what I would call a good movie.)

I've actually never seen it. Which is silly, since I own it. One of these days I'll give it a shot.

I wonder if the 4k version is that one?