It’s a Hollywood rule: If a movie does well, make a sequel. Occasionally it works — Aliens, The Road Warrior, Dawn of the Dead — but too often it leads to disaster. Here are 10 that should be left alone.
AVATAR
Yes, James Cameron is plunging full-bore into a follow-up to the highest-grossing movie of all time. Doesn’t mean he should. How much more of Pandora do we really need?
THE INCREDIBLES
Would the further adventures of the superpowered Parr family be a hoot? Sure. Make a TV show. But the movie is such a perfect distillation of what makes a hero a theatrical sequel would be moot.
BLADE RUNNER
Harrison Ford can surely use a big, honking sci-fi hit these days — I’m sure there’s an enterprising writer that could figure a way to bring Rick Deckard back. Don’t.
THE THING
The ending of John Carpenter’s alien-among-us thriller is a masterpiece of paranoia: Who’s left, and which of us is really us? Such an elegant question deserves to remain unanswered.
SHAUN OF THE DEAD
Of course, there’s always another zombie apocalypse on the horizon. Doesn’t mean that Shaun and Liz should be the ones to fight it. Let the world’s first zom-rom-com rest in peace.
WALL-E
Luckily, Pixar gave us the sequel in the Oscar winner’s closing credits — we know exactly what happened with Earth’s first human colony in millennia. No need to attempt to catch such romantic lightning in a bottle again.
THE IRON GIANT
Brad Bird’s elegy to cold-war panic and boy-and-his-robot innocence ended as sweetly as you can imagine. As interesting as a story about those who built the Iron Giant coming to reclaim him might be…why not just leave well enough alone?
E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL
At one point, Steven Spielberg’s classic was the highest-grossing film of all time. It captivated the hearts and minds of a country. It even had a sequel in novel form, E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet. Thankfully, Spielberg scratched his sequel itch with The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
HOT TUB TIME MACHINE
If Back to the Future III has taught us anything, it’s that yielding to the temptations offered by a time-travel plot isn’t a good thing. Just because you can do a thing, doesn’t mean you should do a thing.
INDEPENDENCE DAY
Every now and again, talk surfaces of continuing the battle between the people of Earth (led by Will Smith’s Air Force pilot) and the spacefaring aliens that fell prey to a 20th century computer virus. And then, thankfully, that talk fades away.
