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Then, of course, there’s the simple fact that some scripts are better than others. What follows are sci-fi franchises that, for a variety of reasons, peaked with round one. But did any of their sequels come close to measuring up? Let’s unpack them all.
5) Jurassic Park
We’re seven movies into the Jurassic franchise by this point, and not one of the six sequels has come close to recapturing the magic of Steven Spielberg’s original film. Jurassic Park so perfectly encapsulated awe, wonder, and adventure that there’s no chance that a sequel will ever mirror its effect.
After all, the veil has been lifted. The audience has now seen dinosaurs convincingly brought to life on the big screen. The Lost World: Jurassic Park feels connected to the original movie because it came out not long after and had much of the same team behind it, and Jurassic World did bring some awe to the table in terms of there actually being a functioning dino theme park, but even still the first is the best by a mile.
4) Men in Black
Like Jurassic Park, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black succeeded in being both a fast-paced adventure and an introduction of something fantastical into our society. It’s just, instead of dinosaurs being brought into our world, we come to learn that there are both aliens among us and those who allow and police their cohabitation with us.
The original Men in Black undoubtedly succeeds in bringing some kooky aliens into play, and a nice balance between funny, docile ones (e.g. the birthing scene and Frank the Pug) with sinister ones, but it’s really the narrative that allows it to excel. It’s a fantastic passing of the torch movie. Then that was undone with Men in Black II, a sequel so light on plot it’s over before it even gets off the ground. Men in Black 3 did manage to be a worthy sequel thanks to the work by Josh Brolin, but even then, it wasn’t exactly an excellent summer movie as much as it was a pretty good one. Then we get to the predictable reboot, Men in Black: International, which never justifies its reason to exists and lines up with the ultra-poor quality of film two.
3) The Matrix
It must have been tough for the Wachowskis to follow-up their The Matrix. It became far more of a cultural sensation than anyone was expecting, introducing plenty of key elements into cinema history: bullet-time, Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, the Agents, the backward-bending bullet dodge. It set an extremely high bar.
To that point, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions were bound to fall short. And, while they’re not quite disastrous, they sure do. Everything new brought to the table doesn’t come close to iconic territory and everything we’ve seen before isn’t done as well as it was the first time. The Matrix Resurrections tried to recapture the first film’s magic, but the way it went about it was somehow both too different and too similar. It felt like a meta remake that wasn’t sure if it wanted to stick to that path all the way through.
