Sequel Escalation / Live-Action Films

• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and particularly At World's End feature more and more insanely over-the-top CGI and action sequences, epic plotlines and 300-million budgets. The On Stranger Tides, however, is intentionally scaled back, returning to the more modest and character-driven style of the The Curse of the Black Pearl. While the Dead Men Tell No Tales is certainly less action-packed than second and third movies due to shorter running time, it drops the trend of back scaling style of Stranger Tides, somewhat returning to the escalated plot of the previous films.
• Some comic book movie sequels are considered superior by escalating the characterization and themes of the first film, that made the comics hits anyway. When they falter, it's often from adding new villains at the expense of the characterization and themes.
  • The Avengers plays it straight — after all it's living up to five movies' Sequel Hooks.
  • The second Avengers movie, Avengers: Age of Ultron is even more bigger and more complex than the first movie, and has a much more global scope (with the action shifting to South Korea, South Africa, and the fictional nation of Sokovia), three new heroes (Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, and The Vision), three new villains (Ultron, Baron von Strucker and Klaw), several new supporting players, numerous subplots, way more action scenes, and a climax that involves the villain trying to use an anti-gravity device to try to raise an entire city into the sky and then drop it onto Earth. Most of the frequent criticisms of the film are essentially along the lines of "It had too many things going for its own good." Ironically, director Joss Whedon initially wanted the movie to be smaller than the first one.
  • The third Avengers, Avengers: Infinity War, brings back all but two of the heroes introduced in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far as this time it's an universe-level threat. Which is brough back in the fourth, Avengers: Endgame, which in the climactic battle has the good side with all the heroes◊ (including the two absent, plus two heroines introduced in the year between movies), reinforced by four armies,^note to wit: the Asgardians from Thor, the Ravagers from Guardians of the Galaxy, the Masters of the Mystic Arts from Doctor Strange, and the Wakandans from Black Panther to show it's one hell of a Grand Finale for what was estabilished in 22 movies.
  • The villain of Doctor Strange (2016) was a broken man and his acolytes, calling forth an eldritch abomination, and the Signature Scene is New York turned into a surreal, kaleidoscopic maze.
  • After tangling with Thanos and saving the universe, Strange returns for Spider-Man: No Way Home, facing villains from multiple alternate universes, plus Spider-Man. One of the signature scenes in the film is the same surreal, kaleidoscopic maze, but now Strange is in control (showing his development) and it combines NYC's buildings with a lot of natural landscapes. Including really hard things like the tree-filled Central Park. The wall-crawler himself goes from facing a single bunch of thieves and arms dealers, then Thanos, then a really good con-man...to the possibility of dimensional collapse, which is a step up from even Thanos.
  • In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the main villain is a ridiculously powerful and desperate former hero who's willing to breach - and jeopardize - universes to get what she wants, and the signature scenes all involve travels through a visually stunning multiverse. There's also much more visually varied magic, like the water/mirror trap, which is, again, very hard to create. One of the first things Strange does is semi-casually beat a multiversal threat, which, again, shows his growth.
• Parodied in Machete: "Machete will be back in... Machete Kills!... and Machete Kills Again!."
  • It´s taken even further in Machete Kills: The movie begins with an obviously fake trailer for Machete Kills Again... In Space. The film than ends with a Sequel Hook where the titular hero actually goes into space hunting for this movies villain. While director Robert Rodriguez intended the movie to get made, till today it stayed a gag.
• The Matrix:
  • The sequels seemed to choose the right elements: the Wuxia martial arts and the philosophy. What the Wachowskis missed was that the martial arts were mixed with suspense, and the philosophy was mixed into the story, not just spouted out of nowhere.
  • In The Matrix, Neo fights Agent Smith who (almost) kills him. In The Matrix Reloaded, Super-Neo fights dozens of Agent Smiths who almost kill him. In The Matrix Revolutions, Super-Neo fights Super-Smith who (almost?) kills him.
• James Cameron decided that he would dramatically escalate the number of Xenomorphs seen throughout Aliens when he made that sequel, but since one Xenomorph Drone was already dangerous enough, the main characters would have to be Colonial Marines just so that they could have some kind of chance against them, but he did not let that get in the way of the suspense even with turning it into an action-horror film along with him also introducing his audiences to the then brand-new Xenomorph Queen caste on top of all of that.
  • Then both averted when compared to the first Alien film and also inverted when compared to the second film during the events of Alien3 due to the fact that it only features one Xenomorph Runner throughout its whole entire runtime and also absolutely no manmade weapons for Ripley and the Fiorina "Fury" 161 inmates to use against him just so that he can have a fair chance at being able to single-handedly kill them all off despite them actually having him outnumbered 26 to 1 at first.
  • Subsequently at the very least played halfway-straight in AlienResurrection since it features another fully-fledged hive of Xenomorph Drones along with their Cloned Queen going up against properly armed humans again and also even the Newborn Xenomorph specimen near the end of the film, but there are also no more than twelve specimens this time around instead of 154 of them like in Aliens.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day had the highest film budget at the time and is widely considered as good or better than the first film. The Terminator had a Killer Robot in human disguise, with a punch strong enough to penetrate you, assigned to kill the mother of a future hero before he was even born with only a Badass Normal sent to protect her. Terminator 2 had a Voluntary Shapeshifting Killer Robot, who could imitate almost anybody and form it's appendages into sharp weapons, sent to kill that future hero himself when he was still a kid with a reprogrammed Terminator (of the same model as the Big Bad in the first film) protecting him despite being an obsolete design.
• Jaws 2 ramped up the body count. Also, they tried to increase the shark's "scariness" factor by scarring it with fire. Jaws 3-D increased the size of the shark from the not-recorded-in-real-life but still-believable 25 feet of the first two films to an impossible 35 feet. Jaws: The Revenge had the shark be back to about 25 feet long but then have a vendetta against the Brody family as well as rather apparent psychic abilities.
• The immediate sequels to Scary Movie and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle upped the raunchy humor. Fans are split as to whether this was a good idea.
• The Godzilla series often does this.
  • The first film was dark and down-to-earth (or at least as down-to-earth a movie about a giant, 'fire'-breathing dinosaur could get). The sequel added another mutant dinosaur monster, but the realistic tone remained for the most part. However, King Kong vs. Godzilla not only gave the series a much larger scale, and a bigger budget, but it was a lot lighter in tone than the previous two. Mothra vs. Godzilla was bit darker, but the film did explore into fantasy elements. The next two films featured beings from space, and the tone on the two was light. The following two had no space elements, but were still wavering in tone, and featured somewhat numerous monsters. Destroy All Monsters, originally intended as the finale, not only had aliens, but 11 monsters, and a fun, light, tone. The next film, brought the series to a whole new level, gearing it towards little kids, and having Godzilla be portrayed as a fictional character. The films from the seventies were filled with aliens and monsters, and had over the top stories, and while violent at times, still geared towards children. However, 1975's Terror of Mechagodzilla, while still had aliens, was given a more serious tone, and while the film has been well-received by critics, the film failed at the box-office, leaving Godzilla on a 9-year hiatus.
  • On the American side, Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) remedied a common criticism that Godzilla (2014) didn't have enough Godzilla, while also adding Mothra, Rodan and King Ghidorah, even more destruction, and revealing that the world is full of monsters (including a tease for a giant ape that will fight the Big G in a sequel). Reviewers and some fans even criticized that the movie went too far on the escalation, both on the action front (as some deem the scenes border sensory overload), and the plot, which goes from a simpler "monsters emerged, better stop them" to a much more complicated one even featuring ecoterrorists that want to use the monsters for their purposes.
  • Then inverted in Godzilla vs. Kong due to it featuring both far fewer Kaiju and also fewer action sequences throughout its runtime on top of that.
• Friday the 13th is particularly egregious with how each sequel escalates the threat Jason Voorhees poses. He goes from being The Ghost in the first film to the villainous monster/antagonist in Part 2, then generally remaining as the main threat who survived what should've been fatal wounds in Part 3 before reacting less to injuries and finally being Killed Off for Real in Part 4. After being a Red Herring in Part 5, he returns as a nigh-undefeatable Revenant Zombie in Part 6 before contending with a telekinetic protagonist in Part 7, taking Manhattan for a while in Part 8, and being revealed to be a literal spawn of Hell in The Final Friday. Then he takes his campaign of terror into space in Jason X prior to the crossover, Freddy vs. Jason.
• Speed 2: Cruise Control was likely the worst choice of the element to escalate. Did it increase the suspense? The Danger? The velocity of the vehicle? Nope. It merely just escalated the size of the vehicle, and actually downgraded the other elements.
• The Karate Kid Part III inverted this, and got a lot of criticism for it, among ... other things. After the first film ends with Daniel winning a tournament, the second film has him fighting for his life, even including the line "This is for real." Then the third film goes back to ending with a tournament.
• High School Musical 2 was a bigger and better sequel, and High School Musical 3 went even biggerer and betterer than HSM2 by getting a cinema budget and a cinema release. The dance scenes become almost absurdly more elaborate, and the sets improve noticeably. It's even lampshaded in the song "I Want It All" when Sharpay notes that "sequels pay better."
• The first follow-up to The Pink Panther (1963), the Dolled-Up Installment A Shot in the Dark, proved that focusing on Ensemble Dark Horse Inspector Clouseau was a wise move. Once Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers revived the series in 1975 (The Other Darrin that was Inspector Clouseau went on without them), they in essence picked up where that movie left off and began escalating the best points of Shot in The Return of the Pink Panther: Clouseau's increasingly thick accent and odd disguises, his battles with manservant Cato, Dreyfus' insanity and murder attempts, and the overall level of slapstick. This worked very well, and two more films (The Pink Panther Strikes Again and Revenge of the Pink Panther) were similar successes, though they also shaded into Flanderization and Sequelitis.
• Mission: Impossible Film Series: The first film excels in how much more subtle it is compared to the other movies, which got more and more action oriented as the series moved forward. In fact, in the first movie, Ethan Hunt only ever loaded, held and pointed a gun in one or two scenes in the movie and never fired it once. You definitely can't say the same thing about the films to come.
• Transformers Film Series:
  • Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen had this trope in abundance given that Michael Bay has managed to convinced the Department of Defense to provide him not only with top of the line military hardware and personnel, but managed to get them to sign off on what the DOD is calling the single largest collaboration with a Hollywood movie ever. Case in point, the primary focus of the first film was to just show the robots, make them believable, and make sex jokes. Good and done. For the second movie, there are several times more Transformers, explosions, and deaths, all manner of designs that go far beyond "car turns into metal human." ^note I give you Arcee (one Transformer with three bodies. None of the bodies look particularly humanoid), Demolishor (main body suspended between two giant wheels, one on ground and one in air, and can switch), "Reedman" (the preliminary name stuck 'cause they never bothered giving him an actual name. Anyway... thousands of tiny spheres roll their way through small spaces to get where they need to go, then combine and flatten out into a robot form that is so razor thin as to be nigh-invisible when seen head-on), and the tiny insectoid spies. Oh, and there's Devastator.
  • Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen is a great example of both sides of this trope. Michael Bay threw in an almost impossible amount of robot violence, with half of the new villains being at least four times bigger than any of the heroes, along with much much more of the sex jokes and cool military stuff from the first movie. The people who liked these things had to change their pants at least three times during the course of the movie. The people who didn't like it tended more towards a murderous rage.
  • The third film had a)raised stakes, and b)about five million plot twists. The fourth film tried to go the same way, and even went more international with a third act in China.
• The first James Bond film, Dr. No, had the tight budget of $1 million — and sometimes it's easy to see it. The huge success of that movie allowed the next movie, From Russia with Love to double the budget, with more action scenes and locales to shoot. And many installments in the series try to top their predecessors since then.
  • One of the justifications Sean Connery had for quitting the Bond role after the effects-heavy You Only Live Twice was that "after blowing up the volcano, where do you go?"
  • The Bond franchise has also inverted this a few times over the years. The best examples are Moonraker being followed by For Your Eyes Only and Die Another Day followed by Casino Royale.
• The Die Hard series is a clear example of this:
  • Die Hard: In a skyscraper.
  • Die Hard 2: In an airport.
  • Die Hard with a Vengeance: In New York City.
  • Live Free or Die Hard: All over the East coast of the US.
  • A Good Day to Die Hard: Moscow and Chernobyl, though the film involved a global terrorist threat.
• Several instances in Star Wars:
  • In Episode IV, the Empire pursues Rebels in a Star Destroyer and destroys a planet with the Death Star. In Episode V the Empire pursues Rebels in a Super Star Destroyer that is many times the size of a Star Destroyer and is the flagship of a fleet of Star Destroyers. Episode VI shows dozens of Rebel ships fighting the Super Star Destroyer, even more regular Star Destroyers, and the second Death Star, which is much larger than the first.
  • Episode IV introduces TIE Fighters, Episode V introduces TIE Bombers (with two cockpits), and Episode VI introduces TIE Interceptors.
  • Each installment adds another climactic scene at the end happening simultaneously. In Episode IV, there is just the battle against the Death Star. Episode V has Luke confronting Darth Vader with the rest of the heroes escaping Cloud City at the same time. Episode VI has Luke against Vader and the Emperor, Han, Leia and Chewbacca taking out the shield generator, and Lando blowing up the second Death Star itself, going on almost all at once. Episode I then goes a step further, with Padmé infiltrating the palace to arrest Gunray, Anakin blowing up the control ship, the Gungans fighting the droid army to keep them away from the city, AND Qui-Gon and Obi-Van's duel against Maul.
  • Even further, Episode II brings in just about every Jedi turning on their lightsabers all at once and a massive Clone Trooper/Battle Droid War Sequence. Then Episode III has a huge Space Battle right off the bat, multiple simultaneous wars, the extermination of the Jedi, and almost as many lightsaber battles as the rest of the trilogy combined.
  • Once the series was revived, Episode VII harkened back to the original trilogy, and escalated on that too: an attack of massive creatures throwing back to the Rancor and Dianoga; a lot of foot battles; and Starkiller Base, a "Super Death Star" built out of an entire planet. Which can destroy entire star systems from halfway across the galaxy. Then Episode IX took the Earth-Shattering Kaboom idea way past eleven with an entire fleet of Star Destroyers armed with planet-busters.
  • Actually inverted in Episode VIII, however, since it is dramatically smaller in scope than any and all other installments seen within the franchise so far due to its main plot being far more personal and likewise also character-driven this time around instead of it mainly being visually grandiose and epic like the whole rest of the saga.
  • Incidentally, Rogue One is an immediate prequel to Episode IV, so we get Prequel Deescalation; the first "single-reactor" ignition of a Death Star (which is also the first firing, period). Not enough to blow up a planet. Just enough to cause an extinction event. It's also an example of escalation, because it's the only movie where we see major named characters on a planet being struck by Death Star-type weapons, and this contrast actually serves to underline the threat of the DS-1 in the original trilogy, and the sheer threat level of the thing.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge was really aiming for this trope, as later described in interviews by the creators. The idea was that, if Freddy is really scary in his victims' dreams, then how much scarier would he be if he were in real life? Though the film had its moments, general consensus is "not very" and its often seen as the Oddball in the Series.
• The Blues Brothers broke the record for most vehicular collisions in a single movie, and its sequel Blues Brothers 2000 made sure to smash the record again.
• The first Back to the Future movie was fairly low-key compared to its sequels. It's rather obvious they got bigger budgets after the first one became a hit.
• The Resident Evil Film Series movies. In the first movie, the T virus was confined to the Hive. In the second movie, it had spread to all of Raccoon City. In the third movie, it infected the entire world, and there are tougher and faster Super Undead.
• The Rambo series counts definitely, since the first movie's action is more about guerrilla warfare, hunting and survival, while the sequels are just loads of machine gunning, shotgunning, bow-and-arrowing, explosive bow-and-arrowing and knife throwing, with the occasional melee kill. All the strategy of the first movie is shrunk down to a single montage, and even then the kills are more flashy and improbable. The best way to measure it is to look at the kill count. Rambo kills one person in the first one (which barely counts since it's an accidental death in self-defense). He kills 58 men in Rambo: First Blood Part II. His knives also got bigger and flashier through the first three films.
• Crank, big time. While Crank was already over-the-top, they pulled all stops on second one and included more violence, sex, Squick and general absurdity in the second one.
• Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is very Recycled In SPACE in terms of plot, but the traps are much more brutal. One of them even ending in an explosion!
  • Home Alone 3 is even worse about this, with one of the traps being a lawn mower falling on a man's face. They also change the bad guys from petty thieves with big aspirations to terrorists/smugglers and make the traps much more elaborate; at one point the main character has a budgie riding a remote-controlled car strike a match to light some dynamite to blow up the criminal's leader.
    • Home Alone 3 To add on the stakes in this movie are now absurdly higher than the previous two movies, as the series went from petty robbery to North Korea possibly nuking America and taking over the world!
• You can tell from the opening disaster alone that the filmmakers intended to take Final Destination 2 to new heights. And the sequels kept on growing and growing, to the point where the over-the-top deaths were parodied in Final Destination 5.
• A Fistful of Dollars was a fairly low budget movie, with a small cast and a story confined to a single small town. For a Few Dollars More, its sequel, had much more action and featured several locations, as well as a larger cast. The prequel, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is nothing short of epic, with a cast of thousands, huge battle scenes, impressive set pieces, more elaborate music, a staggering body count, and nearly double the runtime of either of the previous movies.
• Night of the Living Dead (1968) was a very low budget, low-key movie about some people in a farmhouse fending off a few dozen zombies. Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985) had two more groups of people, in a shopping mall and an underground base, fighting hundreds of zombies. Land of the Dead had an entire city defending itself from thousands of the undead. Also note that the level of gorn increases in each movie ... by a lot.
• Here's a little experiment you can do at home: go watch The Human Centipede, a film about three people who get sown together by their mouths and anuses. Note that its sequel has the subtitle The Full Sequence. Look at an actual centipede. Then look back at the three sown-together people. This experiment goes out the window for the last installment in the trilogy, Final Sequence, which features a centipede composed of 500 people. Even Tom Six himself has stated that upping himself for a fourth movie is all but impossible unless he resorts to stitching up the Earth's entire population.
• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure sent the characters through time, but Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey sent them through both Heaven and Hell.
• True to the title, Hellbound: Hellraiser II took a few of the same characters from the first film, which was essentially a haunted house story, and placed them in, well, Hell. The makers of the third film, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, tried to get around the problem of topping Hell itself by promising a film where the series' antagonists, the Cenobites, are unleashed in an urban setting. The end result was not well-received, to say the very least. Hellraiser: Bloodline has not one but three different stories about the Lament Configuration, set partially in a century past, in the present day, and finally in the framing story which doesn't even take place on Earth.
• Scream 2 lampshades this trope as it pertains to horror movies, providing the page quote in the process. It also tops the original by having, among other things, a murder in a crowded movie theater and the killer crashing someone's car.
• Many viewers who watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) forget that, for all the hype and controversy surrounding the film's content (a group of teenagers stumble upon a Cannibal Clan in the American backwoods), the violence and gore were almost all off-screen. Director Tobe Hooper, in fact, was going for a PG rating^note This was about a decade before the PG-13 rating was created when he made the film. The sequel, however, took Leatherface and his family from the farm into the big city, ramped up the Squick factor, and added in copious amounts of Black Comedy and over-the-top violence.
• Lampshaded in Last Action Hero. Fictional action movie star Jack Slater moans that his adventures seem to get tougher and tougher. Danny comments that the sequels are supposed to get harder. Jack's not amused.
• The Saw movies after the first one saw the traps and "games" becoming increasingly elaborate, and the violence much more explicit. Curiously, the Jigsaw Puzzle Plot structure was also escalated by the sequels, to the point that trying to synopsize the franchise's timeline is a challenging task indeed.
• King Kong Lives adds a female Kong to the equation, and more destruction.
• The Lord of the Rings escalates in a way that works quite well with the progression of the story. The Fellowship of the Ring has a few fights, but focuses mainly on the beginning of the journey and the formation of the titular Fellowship. The Two Towers has two large battles. The Return of the King has the largest battle of the Third Age, and boy does it show. The number of effects shots for the Pelennor Fields battle alone is as high as the total for the first film.
• X-Men: Days of Future Past is an adaptation of one of the most epic and ambitious storylines in the X-Men comic's history, upping up the stakes, action, and the sheer number of mutants.
• Sharknado:
  • Sharknado 2: The Second One increases the scope set by the first movie by having the sharknados made by, rather than just a hurricane, a hurricane combined with a blizzard into a superstorm. And instead of just focusing on the anti-shark struggles of a small handful of characters, the sequel sees the sharks fought by the NYC mayor, the police, scores of survivors armed with chainsaws and other melee weapons, and the folks at The Weather Channel.
  • In Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!, the heroes are fighting the sharks from Washington to Florida and even in SPACE!
  • In Sharknado: The 4th Awakens the series adds a lavanado, bouldernado, electricitynado, cownado, and nuclearnado to the mix.
  • Sharknado 5: Global Swarming had the sharknados appearing everywhere on Earth plus ones spawned by an artifact resembling a Swirly Energy Thingy, culminating in the world's population being wiped out.
  • The series comes to an end in the most over-the-top way possible in The Last Sharknado: It's About Time, which featured time travel and such.
• The Fast and Furious franchise has this in spades, that juxtaposing the original film with any of the sequels highlights just how self-aware and over-the-top it has become:
  • The original movie can best be described as "Point Break with cars". It's a fairly small-scale story whose climax is Brian rescuing one of Dom's team from a trucker with a shotgun, and it has barely (if any) CGI. Beginning with 2 Fast 2 Furious, the series began introducing more CGI and over-the-top chase sequences, to the point that Fast & Furious 6 involves a tank chase on a highway and Furious 7 has the team outracing a military drone. Lampshaded by Owen Shaw when he first meets Dom, who notes how far the latter has come from simply stealing truckloads of DVD players. Come the ninth film, they're driving a car...in space.
  • In the first film, Dominic Toretto is a small-time racer and mechanic who owns a garage and family restaurant, and his major claim to fame is stealing several loads of DVD players. By Fast Five (his third major appearance in the series), he's built a massive operation that is capable of pulling multi-million dollar scores, and by Furious 7, he and his team are called upon by the U.S. Government to help them stop a terrorist operation.
  • The villains. In the first film, Johnny Tran was a small-time criminal. In the second, Carter Verone was a major drug dealer. In the third film, DK was also small time but had a Yakuza uncle. The fourth film has Braga, the leader of a major cartel. The Fifth film has Reyes, who has everyone in Rio in his pocket. The sixth film has Owen Shaw, who has his hands in almost everyone's pockets, including the CIA and the DEA. The seventh has Owen's brother, Deckard, who's played by Jason Statham, alongside Thai martial artist Tony Jaa and a terrorist leader played by Djimon Hounsou.
• Jurassic Park:
  • Isla Nublar goes from hosting a handful of VIPs taking a preview tour of a few barely-functioning attractions in Jurassic Park to a fully open and populated resort zoo with hundreds of dinosaurs and thousands of guests in Jurassic World. The effects, action, and deaths scale up commensurately.
  • The climax of The Lost World: Jurassic Park involved a bull Tyrannosaurus rex being brought to San Diego and wreaking havoc before he's recaptured and returned to Isla Sorna. In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, numerous dinosaurs are taken from Isla Nublar and brought to Northern California...and instead of going back to the island, they're unleashed on the United States. The consequences are dealt with in Jurassic World Dominion.
  • The primary dinosaur antagonists get upped in scale as well. Jurassic Park had the original Tyrannosaurus rex and three Velociraptors. The Lost World: Jurassic Park had a mated pair of T. rexes (and their baby) and a pack of Velociraptors, while Jurassic Park III introduced the Spinosaurus, bigger and meaner than the T. rexes seen before, in addition to a far smarter Velociraptor pack. Jurassic World took it even further, with the powerful and sadistic hybrid Indominus rex and four Velociraptors that had been trained by humans and could respond to commands (though they were still wild animals). Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom scaled things back, with the only remaining Velociraptor being Blue and the main dinosaur antagonist being the Flawed Prototype Indoraptor (though it somehow proved to be even more sadistic than the I. rex). However, Jurassic World Dominion appears to have escalated again, with the Giganotosaurus being the largest theropod in the franchise and stated to have a desire to watch the world burn, and at least three species of raptors appearing in the film (Velociraptor, Pyroraptor and Atrociraptor).
• According to Matt Damon, Jason Bourne is even bigger than the first four movies in The Bourne Series.
• The sequel to Jack Reacher, Never Go Back, features more shootouts, fights, car chases, and explosions, the last of which didn't occur in the first movie.
• The Airport series went this way. Airport had a bomb go off in the cabin forcing a landing during a snowstorm Airport 75 had a hole in the cockpit sucking out the crew and the mid-air insertion of a pilot. Airport 77 had the plane crash and sink into the ocean. Also, in each film, the plane was the most modern jumbo jet. Aiport 79 used The Concorde.
  • The parody series, Airplane! also does this - the first film is just a regular flight from LA to Chicago. The sequel features a passenger airline flying to the Moon.
• In Halloweentown, Marnie doesn't realize she's a witch until several minutes in, and proceeds to help defeat a threat that remains isolated to the eponymous town. In Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge, Marnie (who now has two years' worth of magical training under her belt) performs witchcraft throughout the story, and helps defeat an enemy threatening both Halloweentown and the mortal world.
• The Star Trek Continuity Reboot films, regarding what happens to the Enterprise.
  • In the first one, she takes battle damage but is still capable of warp speed and combat.
  • In Star Trek Into Darkness, she's severely damaged to the point of falling out of Earth orbit and nearly crashing before restoring power at the last minute. It takes a year of repairs before she can fly again.
  • In Star Trek Beyond, she's finally destroyed.
• John Wick overlaps this with Denser and Wackier. The first movie is a straightforward revenge story about a retired mob hitman fighting The Mafiya because the boss’s son beat him half to death and killed his dog. The only glimpse of anything more fantastic is The Continental, a hotel which caters primarily to assassins and other underworld types. The sequels replace the New York crime family with an Illuminati-esque N.G.O. Superpower that secretly runs the world, the plots revolve around blood oaths and the like, most cities seem to be some sort of Gangsterland where half the people you see on the streets are professional killers and gunfights are so common civilians and police barely react to them, setpieces include things like high-speed motorcycle katana fights, and the body count is upped accordingly (he goes from an already-impressive 77 kills in the first movie to a whopping 140 in the fourth).
• 2-Headed Shark Attack is followed by Three Headed Shark Attack and 5-Headed Shark Attack, with a 6-header on the way.
• Deadpool 2 is about the same budget of Deadpool, but certainly more ambitious, with a plot both more whimsical (time travel) and dramatic (Wade become a Death Seeker after his girlfriend dead), and more elaborate action sequences. The fourth-wall breaking Take That! cases also escalate: In the first movie, he (played by Ryan Reynolds) begs that his supersuit not be made green or animated, shows a doll of the mouthless version of himself from X-Men Origins: Wolverine as a punchline, claims Ryan Reynolds has no acting ability, and claims he had to blow Hugh Jackman to get his own movie. The sequel one-ups that in the ending (Wade goes back in time to shoot dead the Origins version and Ryan Reynolds himself before he can do Green Lantern) and adds shots at Logan, which followed the path the first movie opened for R-rated X-Men adaptations.
• The Riddick trilogy plays this straight and subverts it. Pitch Black is a Survival Horror with a group of ship passengers trying to escape a planet while avoiding deadly creatures. The Chronicles of Riddick has the titular character fighting a fleet of space undead, whose leader has superpowers. Riddick then returns to its roots and essentially rehashes the plot of the first film.
• Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle reworks two parts of the first (a board game that releases jungle hazards, and had one player sucked into it) into a successful Actionized Sequel (it's now a video game, all players are sucked into it, where they have to deal with escalating jungle hazards). Jumanji: The Next Level decided not to simply retread that and instead expand, with varied environments and frantic action set pieces.
• Space Jam was fairly straightforward cross between Looney Tunes and basketball: outer space aliens appear wanting to kidnap the Tunes, so the Tunes challenge them to a basketball game and bring in an NBA star to help them win. Space Jam: A New Legacy was a much more complicated affair (a algorithm kidnaps an NBA star, threatens to keep him in cyberspace if he doesn't beat him in a basketball game, allowing the player to recruit the Tunes to be in his team - and then stakes are raised further when the algorithm also brings in people from all over the world to cyberspace, making him threat to both keep them there and delete the Tunes if they lose) while also showcasing just about every property owned by Warner Bros. - the first movie was an Adaptation Expansion of a Nike commercial, while the sequel has been described as a two hour long commercial for Hbo Max.
• The first Top Gun's climax was small-scale, simply consisting of a dogfight against some enemy MiGs. In Top Gun: Maverick? An Airstrike Impossible against an enemy base, followed by escaping from the hostile territory by stealing one of the jets, then the obligatory dogfight against the enemy fighters (only this time there are three of them as opposed to six, except all of them are destroyed instead of a few of them bugging out). Also, the hostiles this time are flying the Su-57 "Felons", which are way superior planes than the Hornets (and later a Tomcat) that the protagonists are flying, to the point that one of the reasons why the mission is as hard as it was is that Maverick wanted to avoid fighting them, and he only engaged them when he is simply left with no other options.

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