Sequelitis - Television Tropes & Idioms

There've been two more since this image was made.

"...'Based on the hit movie series'.... Wait, is it really a hit if the first one was great but the latter two were disappointing failures that made money off the inertia?"

— Morgan Webb, X-Play

As the number of films in a series swells, the probability of an entry that is unmitigated crap jumps to a number greater than 50% with the second installment, and approaches 100% thereafter.

Sequels to movies, generally unplanned ones (as opposed to a planned trilogy for example) and created on the impetus of box office revenue (Roger Ebert, in his Bigger Little Movie Glossary, defines "sequel" as "a filmed deal"), are rarely as good as the movie they're a sequel to. If there is a third installment, it will frequently mark a sharp downhill turn even when the second movie turned out all right. And even if there's a good trilogy, going beyond that has an even greater chance of crap.

Common symptoms of Sequelitis (that is, things which contribute to a sequel not being as well received as the original) include, but are not limited to:

The casual (and sometimes callous) bumping off of beloved characters whose actors refused to return for the sequel.
The mysterious unexplained departure of a hero's love interest (either because the actor or actress refused to return for the sequel or because the producers thought the Shippers would lose interest in the hero if he or she was married.)
In cases where the love interest sticks around for the sequel, expect a pre-movie relationship downgrade, ie: the hero and their love interest growing apart off-camera, before the events in the sequel take place. This allows the producers to "rerun" the romantic elements which worked so well in the first movie, as the hero and their love interest "rediscover" how much they truly loved each other and resolve to get back together. (See the Ghostbusters and Naked Gun movies for examples of this.)
Wacky Wayside Tribes begin choking the plot to conceal the fact that the writers have basically run out of story.
It's natural for producers to try and recapture the magic and tone which made the first movie so successful. However, oftentimes they'll think to themselves: "Hmm. X worked really well in the first movie. If we ramp X up and show ten times as much of it in the second movie, people will love it!" Unfortunately for us moviegoers, "X" usually is toilet humor, sadistic slapstick violence, or something else equally repulsive.
A tendency for the property to escalate into more science fiction, fantasy, or all around ''cartoonish'' elements, when the original at least made some attempt at being realistic (or at least low-key and consistent in its unrealism).
Many sequels begin to suffer from Pandering To The Base. Although it may seem like a good idea at the time — who better to try and get onside than the fans of the franchise? — this rarely ends well; usually, trying to please the fans ends up both (a) isolating a potential new audience and (b) annoying the fans, who are often made to realize that what they think they want isn't necessarily what they actually want, and are very quick and loud to say so. Many filmmakers often have little actual understanding of what fans do want, having merely perused a handful of message boards and assuming they speak for all fandom, if they even do that much research; in essence they end up catering to a Straw Fan. This is particularly the case when bringing back a much beloved character who unexpectedly won the audience over in the first movie, only to do nothing interesting with them or, worse, Flanderize them so much that they end up being a one-dimensional caricature of the charming and multi-faceted character they fell in love with in the first place.
The increasing insistence these days of any successful blockbuster movie to be stretched out to make a trilogy, whether the plot or characters particularly call for one or not; as such, a high-quality and self-contained first movie will often be artificially extended (with or without a Sequel Hook) into two bloated, incoherent sequels with the plot extended beyond its limits and stretched too thin between them.

The format of the sequel also enters the equation. If it's a Direct-to-Video sequel, chances are high that it sucks (unless it is part of the DCAU).

The dreadful compulsion on the part of writers and filmmakers to add new chapters to perfectly good works has been likened to an addiction, sometimes termed sequelholism. The writers sometimes seem aware of this, and as a run of sequels are produced they may drop numbering the movies entirely and start adding cliche subtitles. This only makes it harder to guess the order to watch for new fans. If they aren't aware of this, then, in the end, odds are First Installment Wins.

The inverse is a Surprisingly Improved Sequel. Distantly related to Adaptation Decay. For a strangely divergent sequel, see In Name Only. For a sequel that retains the monster or villain but features none of the original heroes, see Villain Based Franchise. Can be caused by a poor choice in Sequel Escalation, and lead up to Franchise Zombie. Backlash against sequels has made many reviewers Sequelphobic.

Examples

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Film

The entirety of the Police Academy series. The first movie was an (inexplicably) big success, but every sequel afterward grossed considerably less money at the box office. The seventh and (supposedly) final movie in the series, Police Academy: Mission to Moscow, failed to surpass the $200,000 mark, thus sending the franchise to its doom.
Most superhero film franchises follow the same formula: The first film introduces the characters and usually goes through the origin story. It meets with general approval. The second film, not being burdened by the need to rehash all that old stuff, is very good and is considered by many to be better than the original. The third film makes you wonder why they didn't stop at two. Then the fourth film is so bad it makes the third film look like Citizen Kane. Then the series is dead for several years until another sequel is made with massive Ret Con (sometimes to the point of Reboot). However, Batman and Superman are the only two to make it past the third (though a Spider-Man 4 has been greenlit).
- Batman and Superman have taken separate paths after their fifth installments, with Batman Begins a massive success and Superman Returns a modest failure; while the Batman series later went on to produce the one of the most popular movies ever, the Superman series is now enacting what is essentially another reboot.
- Superman Returns arguably suffers from some Sequelitis, as one of the frequently-raised criticisms was that the producers didn't seem to be able to make up their minds as to whether they were actually making a continuation of the earlier film sequence, or whether they were making a completely fresh start.
Scary Movie expressed the tagline, No mercy. No shame. No sequel, but as we all well know, did have one anyway (with the tagline "We lied"), which could qualify as borderline pornography. It got closer back to its roots of satirizing horror movies in the third, but then stepped back again and had that Tom Cruise couch jump parody in the fourth. Rumor has it that a fifth is on the way.
- It's worth noting this is also a massive case of Contested Sequel: depending on your sense of humor, you could easily find any one to be funnier than any other (or none of them obviously).
- The spinoffs of the franchise have been even worse, starting with Date Movie, billed as "from two of the six writers of Scary Movie," and somehow running on to three more (so far...)
Most Slasher Movies tend to suffer this fate as well. Of course, in several of these cases, the first wasn't that great either, but horror fans still prefer the earlier works.
- One particularly painful example: The original Sleepaway Camp was surprisingly deep for its genre, and possessed a genuinely unexpected (yet not nonsensical) Twist Ending that hasn't succumbed to It Was His Sled. The sequels, by comparison, are almost parodies of their predecessor. According to writer/director Robert Hiltzik, only the most recent sequel, Return To Sleepaway Camp, is canon (he had little to nothing to do with 2 and 3).
The American Pie series may be descending into this, as they seem to be releasing one movie a year. Now up to six films total, the latest few (American Pie Presents) have been direct to DVD releases... with predictable results.
- It's worth noting that the sole cast member reprising a role from any of the first three movies is Eugene Levy, which is depressing in a "ordering fast food from your dad" kind of way.
The Crow was a powerful, emotionally-gripping comic book, that had an equally powerful film adaptation—with a kickass soundtrack, to boot. It had several sequels in both media, and none of them were anything close to the original, or even enjoyable. Thus, The Crow uniquely has severe Sequelitis in two media.
Jaws 2, 3, 4, ad nauseam. Ken Begg's series of reviews chronicles the slide in quality from Jaws to Jaws 2 to Jaws 3-D to the So Bad Its Horrible Jaws: The Revenge.
The Neverending Story, of course. Granted, there are people who think that it shoudn't have been adapted to screen at all, but here goes: the first movie, loosely based on the first half of the book of the same name, is a very nice fantasy film; the second movie, very, very loosely based on the second half of the book, is not as good as the first one, but still watchable, at least compared to the third movie, which is... just plain bad.
- Then again, it is rather foolish to assume something called The Never Ending Story wouldn't have at least a few sequels or follow-ups.
The first Weekend At Bernies is a amusing little comedy, with Terry Kiser stealing the show as the titular dead guy. Then they went and made a sequel. The female character one of the heroes spent the entire first movie obsessing over/wooing vanishes without even the most cursory attempt at Handwaving, and it was all downhill from there.
Opinions are divided over whether The Lost World: Jurassic Park or Jurassic Park 3 is worse, although the latter usually wins out in such arguments. Neither of them holds a candle to the original, despite several actors inexplicably agreeing to reprise their roles.
- Although the big divider here is that The Lost World was actually based upon a sequel book that Michael Crichton had written for the first Jurassic Park novel. So it makes sense for there to be at least two movies. There was no book to base a third movie on (although a few novel scenes are adapted for the third installment).
Airplane II: The Sequel, which wasn't produced by James Abrahams and the Zucker brothers who did the brilliant Airplane!. Most of its jokes and plot were re-hashed from the original movie, Leslie Nielsen didn't return, and it did so badly at the box office that the planned 2nd sequel was canceled. The best parts were the courtroom scene and the self-parodying performance by William Shatner.
The first Matrix was generally well-received, and the second and third were seen as as overly long and pretentious.
Movies based on video games aren't exempt from this rule, either, even though very few of them get sequels in the first place (and usually deservedly so). Just ask anyone who paid to watch Mortal Kombat: Annihilation or Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life.
While not having actually watched the sequels to The Santa Clause, I can safely say that it was in effect for those movies, turning most of the reindeer into goofy comic relief types that make strange noises, a far cry from their portrayal from the first movie.
- Indeed. The main draw of the first was the parental bonus provided by Tim Allen, leading to the eventual swiss moments that kids would have when they got older. By the second film this was almost completely non-existant.
Alien and Aliens avoided sequelitis by going in a completely different direction in the second movie, while retaining everything canon. The later sequels, unfortunately, followed this trope perfectly.
Ghostbusters 2 fell victim to this, as the plot reads like a Mad Lib rewrite of the first movie: An ancient (god/warlock) is resurrected in modern New York, possesses Dana Barret's nebbish (neighbor/teacher), and needs (her/her baby) as part of its plot to destroy New York. She gradually falls for Peter's quirky charm, while the rest of the Ghostbusters try to convince the skeptical mayor and a sleazy (EPA agent/mayoral aide) that the world's in danger, until the big finale has the heroes facing off with the (god/warlock) in a gothic (skyscraper/library) now overrun by evil, while a giant walking mascot (terrorizes/saves) the city by stepping on things. It's all made even more implausible given how easily all the world-changing events of the first movie seem to have been swept under the rug, and, after throwing in a good measure of Character Derailment for some of the supporting cast, the end result was so lackluster, both critically and financially, that the director and other three stars were completely turned off from Dan Ackroyd's plans for a third movie.
- Recently, Atari released a Ghostbusters video game that reunited the cast and acts as the third story. So far it's been well received. It expands on things from the first movie, provides closure on the Librarian ghost and explains where the mood slime from GB 2 came from.
The Rocky series had one of the slowest-acting cases of Sequelitis ever. The series started out gritty and realistic, but gradually became more cartoonish, to where, while the first movie won an Oscar for best picture, the fifth is generally regarded as So Bad Its Horrible. Because of the drawn-out decline, it's hard for anybody to point out a single Jump The Shark moment for the series. After a 16-year gap, a sixth entry was made, and successfully took the series back to its roots, as well as providing closure to Rocky's career.
- A dorsal fin was cleared at the start of Rocky V, unquestionably. I, as stated, best picture. II pays off the draw at the end of the first film when Rocky beats Apollo. III was defined by Mr. T's show-stealing performance. IV featured Apollo's death and a knock down/drag out Cold War metaphor that is possibly the only good role of Dolph Lundgren's career. But V reduces titular hero to a second banana, features a wooden Tommy Morrison, a very poorly disguised Don King Captain Ersatz and ends with a street fight, and Rocky still out on his ass.
The Austin Powers series, once it became insanely popular (i.e. by the first sequel), started becoming a caricature of the first movie, with its taking Refuge In Vulgarity and especially their tendency to take gags that were most memorable from the previous movie and exaggerating them in the next. It's often said that if you see the first, you've seen the others already.
Lampshaded twice in Die Hard 2: Die Harder: "Another basement, another elevator—how can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?" The series averts this trope, because even though Bruce Willis stated that "the only really good movie was the first", all the Die Hard installments received some praise.
Friday was a great comedy with good performances from Ice Cube as Craig and Chris Tucker as Smokey, the latter of whom is widely thought to be the funniest part of the film. A sequel, Next Friday, was released in 2000 and is generally considered inferior - mainly due to the lack of Smokey (Tucker had chosen to do the Rush Hour instead and had become a born-again Christian after making Money Talks), who was replaced by Mike Epps as Day-Day - but the movie still has its defenders. 2002's Friday After Next, however, has been almost universally panned.
The first Return Of The Living Dead is an almost perfect mix of black comedy and horror and is also a deconstruction and/or Affectionate Parody of the Romero's "Dead" series. It's a Cult Classic.
- The second uses a lot more comedy than the first making which makes it less scary.
- The third disregards continuity from the first two and makes it Darker And Edgier. More scary but without the charm.
- The 4th and 5th aren't well regarded, making the zombie franchise into a Franchise Zombie.
The Godzilla films often fall under this considering there are 27 sequels to the original Japanese film and one remake. The first film is regarded as a classic and a few sequels are beloved by the fans. However, many films (Especially the ones made in the 1960s-1970s) are considered to be So Bad Its Good or, at the very least Guilty Pleasures. They're not great, but they're certainly not terrible either...except for Godzilla's Revenge and Godzilla VS Megalon. As for the American remake? It's best NOT to mention the remake.
Three trivia questions. 1. How many sequels to Jim Carrey movies has Jim Carrey appeared in? (Answer: 1 - Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.) 2. How many sequels to Jim Carrey movies has he not appeared in? (Answer: 4 - Son Of The Mask, Dumb And Dumberer, Evan Almighty and Ace Ventura Jr..) 3. How many movies in the answer to the last question were any good?
- Jim Carrey so throughly detested working on When Nature Calls that he declared that he would never do a sequel ever again. (As for Batman Forever, that predated the Ace Ventura sequel and didn't follow on from one of his films.)
Some say The Rocky Horror Picture Show had a sequel called Shock Treatment, but surely that's just an Urban Legend.
- This is a Dis Continuity Take That, right?
  - Sadly, yes.
Both averted and straight in The Karate Kid. Part II was different enough from the first movie to avoid falling into this trope, but Part III fell here hard. And don't get us started on The Next Karate Kid.
Star Wars. The holiday special sucked. Empire was good. Jedi wasn't quite as good as Empire. The Ewok movies sucked. But then came prequelitis. But that's nothing compared to the The Clone Wars movie.
Nicely averted by the Evil Dead movies, which stayed great. There's an arguable case that they even got better as they went.
The Fly 2. No Goldblum. No Davis. No Cronenberg. No point.
- There's also a Scanners 2 and 3. And then there's some type of bizarre spinoff called "Scanner Cop", which probably has something to do with the success Robo Cop.
Just ask Highlander fans about the sequels, and you'll be told, "There can be only one."
The Pink Panther movies escalated the slapstick comedy, wacky disguises, and whatnot quite a bit in the 1970s entries, even bringing in science fiction elements in The Pink Panther Strikes Again. There were also new female leads in each entry, whether they became Inspector Clouseau's love interest or not. The series also hit Franchise Zombie status with Revenge of..., which United Artists commissioned for summer 1978. Still, they were all hits — the franchise jumped the rails in The Eighties when director-writer-producer Blake Edwards attempted to continue the series in spite of the death of Peter Sellers, who played Clouseau. It turned out that without Sellers, people weren't interested in more of the same hijinks.
Averted with Robocop 2, but played painfully straight with Robocop 3.
Interview With The Vampire vs. ''Queen of the Damned". Case closed.
Saw fans debate whether the series has suffered from Sequelitis, and if so, at what point. This argument is closely tied to the one over Jigsaw's successors.
The Ju-On/The Grudge film series, which began life as a Takashi Shimizu's V-Cinema TV special but is now up to a second special (which recycled most of the first,) two theatrical Japanese films, two Japanese shorts, an American remake, and two American sequels. Special honors to the first Japanese and American films because they reenacted, almost scene-for-scene in some cases, the exact same plot as the original V-Cinema special.
Similarly, the The Ring franchise has suffered from this. While each of the three "original" films has been well-received (Japanese, American, and Korean, respectively,) their sequels have met with various degrees of scorn and failure. To the point that the very first sequel, a film adaptation of the novel's follow-up Spiral, is so bad it's considered Dis Continuity by the Japanese producers, who went on to make The Ring 2 instead.

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Piers Anthony's series of Xanth novels has reached 30 novels. It Jumped The Shark a long time ago, and currently consists almost entirely of puns and plot developments suggested by readers.
It's general consensus that any sequel to a classic book written in the modern day is guaranteed to suck. See Phantom of Manhattan, see Cosette, etc. etc.
- Susan Kay's Phantom, however, is genrally considered to be pretty good by the phandom, and is even accepted as (admittedly dubious) canon by some. The sequel to the Phantom of the Opera musical, however, is expected to be this.
- Not always, as Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships, a sequel to The Time Machine is considered quite good.
River God, by Wilbur Smith, was quite interesting and different to mainstream fiction. The sequel Warlock went from the engaging and amusing first-person narrative style to third-person, which allowed for us to see scenes from several characters' perspectives, but mostly allowed for gratuitous shoehorning-in of sex scenes to pad out the already inflated-but-largely-empty plot. The most recent installment, The Quest, has almost completely dispensed with any ties to the Ancient Egypt pantheon, instead substituting some vaguely New-Agey mumbo-jumbo universally-recognised quasi-religious belief system. The plot, such as it is, consists of the couple-hundred-years-old-by-now protagonist Taita finding the prepubescent reincarnation of the woman he loved ever since she was a foetus a few hundred years ago and sporting a figurative boner for her for the first half of the book and a literal one for the second half when an evil cult who make stem-cell jelly out of forcibly-created-and-aborted-just-prior-to-term foetuses grow his wedding tackle back for him. He then spends far too many pages learning to control his newly-grown sex equipment so that he can have a sexual psychic showdown with the Femme Fatale antagonist, in which they stay locked in the missionary position for hours until Taita finally manages to suck her life force and magical power out through her vagina with his penis. He then bathes in the Fountain of Youth and gets his thirty-or-so body back, transforming him into the biggest Marty Stu in all of literature, and meaning that when he finally does bone the now-teenage girl he's been lusting after for the past few hundred years, the readers don't have to picture an ancient man made up almost entirely of a beard banging one of the Olsen twins at the beginning of their career. In the end, she manages to bathe in the Fountain of Youth as well, meaning that they can travel the world together and be the biggest Sue-couple ever written for ever and ever and ever. Any of it.
James P. Hogan's Giants series. It's not as if the sequels are bad - it's just that they tend to detract from the previous books. The first book, Inherit the Stars is the story of a bunch of scientists trying to wrap their brains around a massive enigma. The second one, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede brings in aliens, but is fairly similar. The third one, Giants' Star alters the style by bringing in conflict.
- The third also adds the idea that the reason people are evil is because evil time-travellers have made them that way. The fourth expands this to the evil time-travellers were actually taken over by aliens who lived inside a computer.
The sequel novels to The Bourne Series, which contain, in the first addition, Dropped A Bridge On two of the most important characters in the first twenty pages, a character who is canonically supposed to be dead suffering from Parental Abandonment, Comic Book Time, and much, much, much, much Canon Defilement. The second addition is no less egregious, including Dropping A Bridge On Marie In Between Books, having Bourne abandon all common sense, ridiculously atrocious pseudoscience, almost downright offensive portrayals of Washington, DC, and Bourne suddenly becoming an expert on everything, including knowing every language from Arabic to an obscure Ethiopian dialect, when in canon he's just supposed to be a professor of Oriental Studies. Seriously. Also, he carries around a Playstation 3 for no other reason than it looks cool.
Anita Blake books by Laurell K. Hamilton, anyone? Started as quite cool detective store it degraded from book five onward.
Ursula K. Le Guin completed the original Earthsea Trilogy in 1974. Sixteen years later, she wrote a fourth book Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, which suffers from Mood Whiplash, Writer On Board and a lack of plot. And it wasn't even the last book.
55 years after publication of Gone With The Wind, Scarlett, an "authorized" sequel appeared. Critics were not impressed.
- Another sequel,Rhett Butler's People also appeared. The critics panned that one too.
Terry Goodkind's the Sword Of Truth series started putting more and more focus on magical history, objectivist philosophy and the main character's role as a leader after the second book. Your Mileage May Vary on the results, but the common opinion on this site is that it Jumped The Shark, with each book getting worse and worse. Goodkind gave the last three books a rather good attempt to emulate the first two's plot and style, at least.
At the end of The Princess Bride, Goldman provides an "excerpt" from a hypothetical sequel, entitled Buttercup's Baby - its sheer awfulness has proven a very effective deterrent to fans who might otherwise have clamored for a sequel.
Robert Aspirin's Phule's Company series; the first two books are decent, the rest can go rot. But this is partly the fault of Real Life Writes The Plot issues.
- His "Myth Adventure" series, while maintaining a high standard for quite a while, has also recently begun to sag for pretty much the same reason.
- Arguably, this developed for the Myth series in part due to Loads And Loads Of Characters.
The Rocheworld series by Robert Forward likewise has a great first book, a moderately good second, and utter crap dragging along behind.
The Ringworld series by Larry Niven has succumbed to this as Niven has caught Ret Con Fever and begun tearing down the conventions of his own universe.
Most people have the latter half of Stephen King's Dark Tower series falling into this trope. It became especially evident when he had elements of DT leak into his non-DT novels (especially Hearts in Atlantis and Insomnia.)
Andrzej Sapkowski named it as one of major SF&F plagues in his No Gold in the Grey Mountains article... and didn't forgot to add Hypocrisy Nod.
I myself, while considering myself an attentive inspector of the news of fantastics, sometimes don't buy the freshly released sixth book of a saga because my attention somehow failed to register previous five. But much, much more frequently I decline to buy tome one if its cover grins with a warning: 'First Book Of the Magic Shit Cycle'.
Orson Scott Card with his Ender and Shadow saga (the first of each series being parallel, and the rest a split following different characters). While the sequel to Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, is widely considered to be just as good if not even better than the first, the final two in that saga are overly pretentious and bloated philosophical works that could have easily been cut into one shorter volume. They also leave on a horrible cliffhanger that rivals that of [[Dune Chapterhouse: Dune]] which Card has had 13 years to end, but instead written a midquel between the first and second books as well as a short story collection. The Shadow series fairs even worse, with the first book being equal to or better than the parallel Ender's Game (Your Mileage May Vary) but taking a steep decline starting with the second. While not as bloated in narrative as the Ender saga's latter books, the Shadow series instead destroys most of the mystery behind Peter's unification of earth by making him into nothing but an annoying schoolchild, and literally doing absolutely nothing. A fourth sequel is planned, thus putting the entire series at 11 books.

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Opinion differs on whether Master of Orion or Master of Orion II is the better game, but almost no-one thinks Master of Orion III is anything but unmitigated crap.
X-Com: UFO Defense (or UFO: Enemy Unknown, depending on where you live) was a surprise hit, with its great atmosphere, fine management section, and superb tactical section. Microprose decided to ride the wave and, after less than a year, released X-Com: Terror From The Deep: under a shiny package of better graphics and sound, the game was exactly the same, only taking place underwater, with difficulty re-balanced for the worse, and bugs that could block the tech tree, making the game unwinnable. X-Com: Apocalypse was from the original developers but, sadly, it completely lacked atmosphere and, while trying to be more complex, it became cumbersome. X-Com: Interceptor (a mediocre Wing Commander clone) and X-Com: Enforcer (a shallow Third Person Shooter) followed and were quickly and deservedly forgotten, while more interesting projects were cancelled thanks to the mismanagements of Microprose and Hasbro Interactive. No wonder the franchise is dead.
Baldurs Gate, a great game, was followed up by Shadows Of Amn, which was amazing. Then came Throne Of Bhaal, which could best be described as...rushed.
- Thankfully, the Ascension modification, created by one of the original designers of Throne of Bhaal, adds, changes, or corrects most of the rushed aspects and makes the expansion pack much more fun.
Nearly any Lemmings game after Lemmings 2: The Tribes.
Tomb Raider 2 was generally considered almost equal or superior to the original on release, 3 and 4 both involve heavy amounts of Your Mileage May Vary as to where you place them. By 5 the series had firmly fell into this trope and Angel of Darkness was the last straw before the series began recovering by being moved to another developer.
Mario Party has pretty much fell into this and Capcom Sequel Stagnation, going nearly completely off track from the source material and decaying in quality by the game in general (up to a total of 12 games in just a few years so far).
- 90% of this suck is from the computer blatantly cheating in anything even mildly luck based, even dice rolls from 6 onwards.
Earthworm Jim was a weird and well-received game. The second game was even better in nearly every aspect. Then the series met the Polygon Ceiling courtesy of a different developer, and anything resembling quality went out the window. Then Shiny Entertainment themselves threw their own quality off their windows some time after dumping Jim.
Mega Man has been all over the place with this. At some point a given series starts sucking hard and a spinoff is made. It starts off great, then slowly slides into crap until a spinoff is made and the cycle begins anew.
- Mega Man 7 was released after the series' first spinoff, and it and its following installments are considered massive improvements. Fans still consider Mega Man 2 and 3 to be the pinnacle of the series, however. Also, Your Mileage May Vary when it comes to Mega Man & Bass.
- Mega Man X8 was also surprisingly good despite the enormous amounts of Fake Difficulty. Apparently Capcom sequels go in cycles.
  - I submit the awesomeness that is Megaman 9 in support of that theory.
- Mega Man Battle Network actually really improved for the last installment, although the two proceeding ones were pretty mediocre.
Perfect Dark is considered one of the best Nintendo 64 games. Prequelitis ensued with Perfect Dark Zero, you can essentially call it a In Name Only prequel. The continuity of of the first game is only glanced upon, Joanna is a spunky oddly clad girl with red hair and a penchant for one liners. The Carrington Institute makes an appearance.....with Carrington himself having become 200% more Scottish complete with a kilt. The aliens are non-existent only hinted, the main antagonist being a company connected to dataDyne being run by a small stereotypical Chinese man. The gameplay? The game was developed by a different team, that speaks for itself. Go watch Perfect Kirby for some real fun and without having to pay anything.
Destroy All Humans! The less said about the incoming Way of the Furon, the better.
- It's Path of the Furon, and it was certainly better that that atrocious Wii Spin Off called Big Willy Unleashed. Thanks to it DAH! is Ruined FOREVER.
Star Control was a fun turn-based strategy game. Star Control 2 was an epic action-adventure. Star Control 3, made by none of the people involved with the first two, is a game most fans try to forget about.
Some fans of the Need For Speed series argue the series got really bad after the third or so installment, especially when it started drifting into GTA territory.
- Nobody liked Undercover, to the point where EA seems determined to overhaul the franchise.
  - ...by having every game in the series from then on being about underground street racing with storylines (as opposed to the previous games, which were focused entirely on the racing).
There's a lot of flame wars out there about whether this applies to Final Fantasy. Seeing as the Final Fantasy title is pretty much just a way of adverting that it's a JRPG that Square Enix put a lot of money into, this is somewhat nonsensical.
- The few actual sequels have had mixed results. Some of them, like Crisis Core, have been considered worthy follow-ups. Some of them, like Advent Children, Dirge of Cerberus, and Final Fantasy X 2, start flame wars.
- The real downside is that Square is now making games which effectively require sequels (I'm looking at you FFXII) instead of making self contained stories.
Arika's Tetris: The Grand Master series got better with each new release for its first three installments. Then came the very un-TGM-like title Tetris: The Grand Master ACE, the tragic byproduct of The Tetris Company's and Microsoft's Executive Meddling. Most of the trademark TGM gameplay mechanics have been stripped (including Master mode, and by extension the unique TGM-style leveling up and grade system), you get a variation of infinite spin (limit of 128 rotations and 128 movements) as opposed to TGM's "step reset" lock delay, and you need an Xbox Live Gold membership to unlock proper TGM rotation. Good Tetris, but bad TGM.
The Army Men franchise was initially insanely popular. Then somewhere the lack-luster spin-offs and In Name Only sequels slowly choked off sales until the company finally went bankrupt in 2003. Even with the parent company dead, other companies are still trying to make cash off of the brand, the latest entries getting some of the worst reviews in shooting games.
Manhunt was a well-received game for its creepy tension, innovative use of sound, complex enemy AI, and wide variety of kill moves. Manhunt 2 was a step back from that, with less intelligent enemies, less menace and tension, and a confusing story. At least the Gorn is still good.
The original Double Dragon was a fairly innovative beat-em-up that introduced some of the conventions used in later games of the genre like two-player co-op and obtainable weapons, while the arcade version of Double Dragon II was mostly a Mission Pack Sequel with a fairly improved NES version. Double Dragon 3 on the other hand, featured crappier "realistic" graphics, replaced half of the original game's moves and weapons with ineffectual new ones, and added a gimmicky shopping system where you can purchase power-ups for your character (including a replacement character) by inserting more tokens to the machine. There were a few more Double Dragon games after the third one, but the series never achieved the same level of popularity it once had with the first two games.
Shift 4 lampshades this in the ending, aware that it is now a quadrilogy. "Who is the game that risks its rep on Sequel Shame? Shift!"
Backyard Sports is the Most Triumphant Example of this trope; within a few years, it went from a clever game series with lots of jokes both kids and sports fans can get to one of the worst ever.
Homeworld averted this, barely, with 'standalone expansion' Cataclysm, despite it being a literal Mission Pack Sequel. It caught some flak for the dramatic shift in narrative tone and the new tech and ship designs were a bit hit-or-miss, but it did some pretty cool stuff with the existing graphics engine and generally came across like the development team at sub-contractee Barking Dog had at least played the original. Homeworld 2 was a bit less fortunate, however; a lot of the original creative team had moved on in the interim, and Relic massively over-extended themselves trying to create game environments with 'megastructures' straight out of the best kind of SpaceOpera and generally go Beyond The Impossible, and much of the more Crazy Awesome stuff failed to make the final cut. The end result was by no means bad -the graphics stand up quite well six years later and it's a lot more mod-friendly than the previous two- but the finished product had several minor but annoying bugs and balance issues and generally felt rushed. The gulf between Relic's original vision and what we actually got didn't help.

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Western Animation

Disney + Direct-to-Video Sequels = What Were You Thinking?
- This includes a sequel midquel to the classic 1942 film Bambi. That's right, a direct-to-video sequel to Bambi that came out more than six decades after the original was released. Disney recently realized that having lots of horrible, cash-in sequels was a really terrible idea, and locked them in the vault forever. This is perhaps the only good thing that came from that vault...
- One of the conditions Pixar put when they joined with Disney was that they wouldn't be required to make sequels. In fact, because one of the parts of the merger was putting Pixar's people in charge of Disney's animation studio, one of the first things they did was transfer production of Toy Story 3, which had been started by Disney themselves when it looked like the studios were about to part ways, over to Pixar.
- You know what happens when you let a ten year old fan girl watch Pocahontas 2? Tantrums. Boycotting. Door slamming. Increased phone bills. Pink hatemail.
- The Emperor's New Groove managed to really break the mold in terms of Disney animated movies, but its sequel was rather generic, playing out more like three episodes of a TV show strung together than an actual movie.
The Land Before Time was a great movie. Some of the sequels weren't bad if you could get past the part that they were musicals while the original wasn't. Among fans (keep that in mind) there's usually a downhill slide in quality starting from the second to the sixth (a dinosaur movie which, I shit thee not, contains a WESTERN-THEMED NUMBER), then a slow increase in quality leading to the tenth, which is generally thought of as the pinnacle of the sequel movies (although still certainly a long way down from the original) And then came second, more rapid downhill tumble, leading to the 13th(!!!) and final movie, as well as the Recycled The Series, before the offices at Universal responsible for the series were finally closed.
- And an animated TV series.
- You know sequelitis has set in when they stop mentioning the number it is. They even went as far as to retroactively remove the numbering from the older movies, too.
  - All of Don Bluth's classic films got hit with Sequelitis: in addition to the above-mentioned Land Before Time, there were also sequels for An American Tail, All Dogs Go To Heaven (which also got a TV series), and The Secret Of NIMH. In all of those cases, Bluth was not involved with any of the sequels; the only sequel he was ever actually involved with making was the Anastasia direct-to-DVD sequel Bartok The Magnificent, which became a classic that we've all heard of. Oh, wait...
The Simpsons comic book storyline "When Bongos Collide!", in which everyone in Springfield gets superpowers as a result of a nuclear explosion, parodies this trope with Troy McClure's alter-ego, The Sequelizer. As he describes it, his power is that he "can create an infinite number of copies of [himself] — although each is only 50% as powerful as the one before."
Like in Don Bluth's franchises mentioned above, Balto had a case of Sequelitis. The first sequel was just undeniably horrible, with the second arguably being a lot better (but still way down the original, obviously). The sequels caused so many plot holes that many fans asked for the release of one that fixes everything so that the franchise can rest in peace, but given Universal Picture's irrational hatred of the movie they opted for making more The Land Before Time sequels until their traditional animation studios were closed for good

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Sequel Escalation

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