Sometimes, a one-and-done is justifiable and would help preserve a movie’s legacy. Not every Hollywood project needs to be turned into a litany of sequels or a franchise; just look at Joker: Folie à Deux and the Fast and Furious series. Sometimes you can’t strike the same gold as Mission: Impossible, John Wick, or even The Exorcist with its underrated third installment, nor should you try.
Whether it’s horror, a sci-fi blockbuster, or action-adventure, plenty of movies over the decades have fallen into the trap of making incredibly undesirable sequels that fell short of the original. Below are some of the most notable cases where studios should’ve known when to quit.
12Sleepaway Camp
In a world of Friday the 13th, Terrifier, and Halloween, Sleepaway Camp is a very underrated, hidden gem slasher amidst the more popular giants of the genre. The series riffs on the summer camp horror premise of the Friday the 13th series, but only the first film is truly well-made, with gruesome deaths and a story that delivers a shocking finale twist about the killer’s identity.
Sleepaway Camp starts with a boat accident and follows traumatized young survivor Angela Baker, who attends Camp Arawak as murders begin happening all around her. It ends on a perfectly disturbing note that should’ve seen it as a one-and-done rather than spawn sequels (some that are many years apart, and the 2012 installment received an abysmally low 1.6 on IMDb).
11Highlander
Highlander is a campy sci-fi historical fiction film about an immortal Scottish swordsman named Connor MacLeod, who immortal enemies lined up to fight in the present day. The film has a great soundtrack, stars Christopher Lambert, the legendary Sean Connery, and Clancy Brown as the villain, and is a very unique action-adventure movie, alternating between the past and present timelines.
You really shouldn’t go wrongwith well-choreographed and over-the-top sword fightsand having Sean Connery in your movie, but the sequels ultimately did. Though Connery reprised his role for the next film, The Quickening, alongside Lambert, the movie was met with very low reviews (a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes as well). Fast-forward to the fifth film in 2007 and the movie titles only got worse, and the ratings dropped even lower.
10Starship Troopers
Starship Troopers is a cult classic sci-fi military creature feature. Under orders from the United Citizen Federation, soldiers are sent to off-world planets to fight a species of giant alien bugs known as Arachnids. But as RoboCop had already proven years before, making sequels to Paul Verhoeven’s original work is not a recipe for success.
Starship Troopers was a film created to be a satire on fascism through a sci-fi premise, and it made an effective commentary on the military. The sequels ultimately lost sight of that vision and became some of the worst films you could watch. While Starship Troopers 2 is semi-tolerable with its eerie, more horrific bug parasite storyline, the third film and the animated spin-offs are horrendous and overkill;just wait for the Helldivers adaptation.
9The Butterfly Effect
Outside of romantic comedy films and sitcoms like That ’70s Show and Two and a Half Men, Ashton Kutcher is also known for The Butterfly Effect. As the title suggests, the movie achieves a dramatic sci-fi story that’s exactlylike most choice-driven video games you can play, such as Life is Strange and Until Dawn, portraying the butterfly effect and different choices leading to different consequences.
Kutcher plays Evan Treborn, a college student whose journal allows him to revisit moments from his past and change them around, thus his future becoming altered in significant ways as a result. Though panned by critics, The Butterfly Effect was well-received by audiences, and it then got two sequels, which were deemed terrible by everyone and diminished the legacy of the first film, especially with the original premise feeling special to Kutcher’s character.
Ironically, the writer-directors of The Butterfly Effect, Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, wrote the screenplay for Final Destination 2, a worthy sequel and an iconic entry in The Final Destination series.
8The Lost Boys
The Lost Boys isa classic coming-of-age teen vampire horror filmset in the fictional California town of Santa Carla, which was filmed in the real-life town of Santa Cruz, California. The film using Santa Cruz as its location, seeing young actors Kiefer Sutherland and Corey Feldman returning to star on-screen together after Stand by Me, and the movie’s overall vibe and story made it an iconic experience.
The movie follows two brothers who move to Santa Clara to live with their grandfather after their mother’s divorce, soon becoming embroiled with a local gang who turn out to be vampires terrorizing the town. It received two sequels, The Tribe and The Thirst, with both seeing the return of Feldman’s vampire-hunting character, Edgar Frog, and both failing miserably at holding a candle to the original.
Lost Boys: The Tribe and Lost Boys: The Thirst both hold a terrible perfect score of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.
7From Dusk Till Dawn
From Dusk Till Dawn is another notorious vampire movie with this issue.The original film is not only co-written by Quentin Tarantino, but it also stars the famed director in the lead role alongside George Clooney and Salma Hayek, with her iconic role as exotic dancer Santanico Pandemonium. Tarantino and Clooney play two fugitive brothers-in-crime, who end up kidnapping a family and taking refuge inside a strip bar in Mexico that’s inhabited by vampires.
With the genre-bending storyline and direction of From Dusk Till Dawn, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez once again proved they’re a match made in crime thriller gore heaven. Though the sequel installments kept Danny Trejo’s character around, they were clear cash grabs based solely on the name and lost the spark that the Gecko Brothers brought to the original.
In 2014, Robert Rodriguez developed From Dusk Till Dawn into a TV series, which ran for three seasons and was better received than the sequels.
6Bloodsport
Jean-Claude Van Damme is an iconic martial artist and action movie star, up there with Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Statham, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and all the greats. Bloodsport was certainly one of Van Damme’s best films, a career breakthrough and an instant martial arts classic that then went on to inspire the video game series Mortal Kombat,where he was even featured in MK1. It’s safe to say, though, that the Mortal Kombat series fared much better.
Bloodsport is based on army veteran Frank Dux’s seemingly true life story (at least according to him), where he was trained in ninjutsu and fought and won an underground martial arts tournament in Hong Kong. It even featured one of the earliest performances by Forest Whitaker. Then came 2, 3, and 4, and then the 2017 reboot and semi-legacy sequel Lady Bloodfight, which were all without Van Damme and rated poorly.
5The Crow
The Crow is probably one of the most egregious victims of trying to turn a coveted classic into a larger failed franchise, especially since the late great Brandon Lee tragically lost his life during the making of the film. What should’ve been a standalone supernatural Gothic revenge flick honoring Lee’s legacy turned into an anthology movie series of new characters becoming The Crow (each one worse than the last) and then also a canceled TV series.
The Crow is based on the comic series by James O’Barr, where Eric Draven and his girlfriend Shelly are both killed, and he returns from the dead with the gift of invulnerability to avenge her brutal murder. Brandon Lee played the titular character of Eric Draven, a rockstar-turned-resurrected vigilante in the movie adaptation, with the film having a perfect Gothic atmosphereand dark superhero narrative.
Despite the critical reception and fan outcry, the 2024 re-imagined film directed by Rupert Sanders and starring Bill Skarsgård and FKA twigs is a redemption for the sequels and a worthwhile movie filled with some great action, storytelling, music, and cinematography. Also,it’s Kojima-approved.
4Kingsman
After Kick-Ass, filmmaker Matthew Vaughn was on the right track in starting a new comic book adaptation movie series with Kingsman: The Secret Service. You had a likable protagonist named Eggsy, wonderful performances by Samuel L. Jackson and Colin Firth, and some of the best-choreographed action sequences in recent memory. Then, the 2017 sequel and 2021 prequel ruined all the momentum the first film had.
The first Kingsman gave cinema many iconic and memorable moments that also showed the origin story of Eggsy, a young man who gets recruited into a secret British spy agency to save the world and uncover a conspiracy within the organization. While The Golden Circle has its moments with Elton John, a human meat grinder, and the American cowboy branch featuring Pedro Pascal and Channing Tatum, The King’s Man nuked the franchise.
3The Mummy
If you enjoyed the Indiana Jones series, The Mummy would’ve been your next stop to continue the adventure felt in those films, and it would also be the last stop. The Mummy Returns, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and even The Scorpion King spin-off (which launched numerous horrible sequels of its own) have ultimately failed to live up to the original’s charm. And then, the lackluster 2017 reboot starring Tom Cruise made those sequel attempts look Oscar-worthy.
The Mummy had the beloved cast of Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, and John Hannah as the main protagonists banding together to discover the ancient City of the Dead known as Hamunaptra, where they encounter Imhotep, a powerful mummy priest portrayed by Arnold Vosloo. The story was perfect with plenty of memorable scenes and set pieces; if only the other films could have been the same.
