Improve a Film Series/ Contested Sequel

We've all seen this before. Sometimes in a film series, trilogies especially, the the first film is usually always the best, while the second film is either the falling out or Surprisingly Improved Sequel, but the third is horrible (with possible exceptions to this being Lord Of The Rings and Toy Story). So what do you think can/ should've been done to improve a film series' weakest film or Contested Sequel? How could it be better in your opinion?

For instance, I just rewatched the Back To The Future Trilogy and loved the first two films but was not as impressed with the last one, particularly for it's randomly offset western motif. Yeah, it was tried to be set up in the second film but other than that there's no set up or connection from the first film that alludes to a western ending (and IMO, it didn't actually feel like a BTTF film). That's why, for the penultimate last installment, I would have liked to have seen it set in a place where Doc Brown has been warning in every other film- a place because of their constant tampering with time travel, it resulted in not only the destruction of space time continuum but time itself no longer exists, leading to The End of the World as We Know It (think the ending scene to SB129). Not only could it be their largest adventure ever, since they not only have to restore the time machine but they also have to restore time, but it could also serve as a giant throwback to both other films. Anyway, that's just my personal idea.

edited 10th Jan '11 1:33:37 AM by Mattonymy

Transformers: Cut out the Fifteen Minutes With Jerks, up more robot slapping and dial the military presence down a bit.

Jurassic Park: Keep the T-Rex rampage, but make it obvious that Sarah doesn't know what she's doing. Nearly all the fucking complaints of The Lost World was bitching about Sarah being naive and provoking dinosaurs and that releasing the dinosaurs from captivity instead of a dangerous transport to San Diego was somehow villainous.

Case Closed: The Phantom of Baker Street. Replace the boy that looks like a girl with Heiji/Harley and I'll finally have him in one of the better movies (why does he have such roles in not as epic plots?).

The Lion King 1 1/2: With animation and writing like that, it should've been in theaters!

Shrek: bring Lord Farquaad back from the dead by revealing that he cut himself out from the dragon Beowulf-style and make Shrek Forever After about Farquaad trying to get Fiona back. Also would make a great bookend.

Transformers: have the film take place in a retro future where everything still looks like 1984, make Bumblebee a Volkswagen again and put almost all focus on the robots.

Spider-Man: bring in Gwen Stacy earlier than a thankless role in Spider-Man 3.

X-Men: bring Gambit into the story.

Austin Powers: have Goldmember tie in with the plot of The Spy Who Shagged Me so the film doesn't because a directionless mess of a film.

Saw: never have Detective Hoffman show up. He was possibly the worst protagonist in horror film history (and yet he sticks around for four films).

Final Destination: keep the deleted "Clear is pregnant" subplot in the film and use the original ending where Devon Sawa's character dies and the baby is the last thing to remember him by. This ending ties everything together and prevents any opportunity for a sequel. But test audiences had to get their way and we got bad sequel after bad sequel.

Transformers: Cut out the Twenty Minutes with Jerks, have Sam and his parents be normal rather than wimpy, introduce Megatron earlier, and have more robot battles. Also, make the robots have the plating and insignias that they had in the cartoons so that you can tell them apart.

Spider-Man 3: Cut out the Love Triangle with Harry, save Venom's appearance for a new movie, and get Harry to move on with his life and get a Happy Ending.

edited 13th Feb '11 10:37:20 AM by shiro_okami

The Mummy 3: Have Rachel Weisz back instead of casting Maria Bello. There are too many other problems to list but that's the one which strikes me immediately.

Attack of the Clones: Leonardo Di Caprio as Anakin.

Transformers 3: Either have a simpler plot or spread out the exposition so that we aren't given loads of details in one quick scene.

The Dark Knight: Save Two-Face for the sequel, by making Harvey's injuries into a cliffhanger ending.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Make it a sequel, not a prequel, to Raiders of the Lost Ark. After all, they didn't bother explaining Marion's absence in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which takes place 2 years following Raiders.

Star Trek First Contact: Take out the Borg Queen. She's an unnecessary addition to the Borg, going against everything the Borg embody.

Star Trek Insurrection: Make the Son'a a completely different species instead of exiled members of the Ba'ku.

Star Trek Nemesis: Make the Romulans, not Shinzon, the Big Bad.

THIS!

Merge the Matrix sequels into one movie. Cut out a large portion of the subplots (like Neo's dreams about Trinity) and focus on the main one about the Architect's revelation. Make the Architect god damn comprehendible so that his revelation actually functions like one instead of leaving confused as to what the fuck he just said. Get rid of the Zion rave scene, cut down on the fights, maybe even make them a little more John Woo gunfu style like the first movie instead of just wirefu martial arts, cut down that stupid car chase, edit the hell out of the machines raiding Zion etc. Basically, give these films a damn editor, they have a lot of interesting ideas but it's weighed down by so much bullshit.

Iron man 2, get rid of the palladium poisoning sub plot and get rid of SHIELD aside from Phil Coulson. Just have Stark reach for the bottle after Vanko shows up because he now knows that his tech is achievable by others and in the wrong hands it reap serious destruction, and also because his Father seems to have been a dick to Vanko's dad. Coulson can just show up to be a straight man who occasionally helps around instead of Fury showing up and removing all the ambiguity by saying "Nah, Tony, Howard was a total bro! Vanko's just an ass, serious". Focus on those main story lines and stop reaching for humour in the place of storytelling and characterisation and it should be a much better film as a result.

edited 22nd Jun '12 9:44:15 PM by ShadowScythe

Revenge Of The Sith: Have Padme survive childbirth and go with Bail Organa to Alderaan with Leia, posing as a handmaiden.

Star Trek Generations: Take the Duras sisters out altogether. They have absolutely impact upon the story.

Wild Wild West: Cast someone else, e.g. George Clooney, as West. Make West and Gordon friends already. Take Salma Hayek's character out altogether.

Star Trek First Contact: Take out most (all?) comedic scenes involving Cochrane, e.g. drunk Troi, "take a leak".

Batman Forever: Make the villain either Two-Face or The Riddler. Not both. Likewise, with Batman And Robin, make the villain either Mr. Freeze or Poison Ivy, taking Bane out altogether. And if you truly want Barbara/Batgirl in there, make her related to Commissioner Gordon.

Men in Black 2: Keep K out. The character had his swan song in the first film, let him enjoy his retirement. Keep the focus squarely on J and L's relationship (which cannot be a romantic one!).

J is, at his core a "people person"; he cares for the little guys. L on the other hand is more goal orientated. Give them some friction due to their differences in style (and have their relationship tested by the villain), but ultimately have them an effective team.

Make the villain a real threat and more intimidating. Serlina was a terrible villain whose only shtick was being attractive. Make the villain the Anti-Edgar the Bug. Have him be fine and sophisticated; play up their differences and give him a goal that more directly affects Earth. Make him something of an exterminator-for-hire who plans to unleash an alien virus or something.

Superman IV The Quest For Peace: Make Bizarro the creation of Lex Luthor, not Nuclear Man. Take Lacy Warfield out altogether. Restore most deleted scenes.

I guess this is less "improve" and more "rewrite from scratch". But...

X-Men: The Last Stand. The "mutant cure" is not real, but a scam being run by Mr. Sinister—he's taking the most powerful mutants who come to him, and brainwashing them to form his own army. Sinister has also used his powers to resurrect characters from the previous films—like Sabertooth and Lady Deathstrike—and brainwash them into serving him as well; he's in the process of doing this to Jean Gray. The X-Men and Magneto must (for real this time) work together to stop Sinister.

Rogue, attempting to receive the cure, happens to be at Sinister's clinic when the big fight breaks out. She ends up using her powers to put one of Sinister's goons into a coma, and finally becomes a competent fighter with the powers she steals from said goon.

Sinister is mortally wounded in the fight; before he dies, he gloats that the X-Men and Magneto have doomed the world, because the army he was building was the only thing that could stop the coming apocalypse. Thus serving as a hook for the sequel with Apocalypse as the villain...

The Thing prequel: Remove the forced-in Americans and just assume Translation Convention. Don't add cgi over the practical effects. Rewrite the plot to not be a carbon copy of the first movie; a good way to do this is to dramatically change the main character so she's not just an inferior Mac Ready.

Batman Returns: Keep Billy Dee Williams in the third role and have the generator make him Two-Face for the third,...make Christopher Walken the mayor whose baby got saved or some other one scene. Max Schreck was a terrible idea

Attack Of The Clones: Keep that scene where Padme brings Anakin home,have Anakin not Obi-Wan jump out the window after the assasin,and maybe make it a few years earlier,instead of an unholy 10 years after Episode 1

Lord Of The Rings: Not have Frodo force Sam to leave and keep in The Scouring of the Shire,oh yeah and ax a few Arwen scenes in favor of Eowyn/Faramir scenes

Because I watched it last night, Alien3! For the record I have the 2003 recut which I'm led to believe is an improvement on the theatrical release.

The set up here is the first major problem in the movie. Ripley really shouldn't have been the protagonist of this story at all. Aliens wraps up her story quite nicely and that really ought to have been the end of her arc. Shifting focus to a grown-up Newt or Hicks and Bishop leading a crack team of alien killers or something more creative than what we got. Hell, it might even have been the ideal time to do what Prometheus was trying to do and find another element of the series' mythology to focus on.

In the end, effectivley wiping out the events of the previous film was outright mean spirited. You'd might as well just go straight from leaving the Nostromo to crashing into Fury if that's the route you're going to go down. And to make it even stupider, they then knock off Clemens early on despite him being the only interesting character in the film.

Now, in these kind of movies Anyone Can Die is generally a good thing - it stops things being too predictable and keeps the audience on their toes (see Tom Skerrit, who got top biling, being killed in Alien). But, it's just frustrating when all you're left with is dull, flat, unlikeable and totally interchangable Cannon Fodder (they even all look the same! Even Ripley!). The previous two films at least took the time to build up most of their cast and when they died a point was made that these were people dying. It had a purpose beyond just killing people.

What was the purpose here? In the previous two movies, it served to both establish that the alien was not to be fucked with and isolate the surviving cast. In Aliens especially it allows Hicks and Ripley to come to the fore and develop as total badasses. One dead convict after another is completely inconsequential and even the characters in the film don't really give a shit.

And speaking of not giving a shit, the implanted Ripley subplot. The movie pretty much tells us flat out in the first few minutes that Ripley has it inside of her and it screws up any kind of suspense the movie might have had. If we already know that she isn't going to survive then what's the point in the rest of this story? Maybe this plot could have been an interesting one in a film without Ripley as the star but it's so obvious here that it just doesn't work at all.

The alien itself is just pathetic. As in Uwe Boll's Alone In The Dark level of ridiculous. The CGI effects completely fail to make the thing look frightening and the monster itself is far, far too overexposed to the audience. The original film made great use of Nothing Is Scarier; it built fantastic tension and threw up some great scares as a result. Here there's practically no tension and everything the alien does is totally predictable. The alien-o-vision sequences look like a cheap B-movie effect. If they wanted to go back to a claustrophic horror like the original, then they should have stuck to the basic formula for the creature that the original perfected.

edited 24th Jun '12 7:04:04 AM by TheBatPencil

The Phantom Menace: Make Anakin a teenager. Maybe not the same age as Luke and Leia in A New Hope, but at least around the same age as Padme.

The Phantom Menace. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, cast Jake Lloyd as baby Darth. Cast instead Haley Joel Osment. And bathe in the praise.

Star Wars- No Phantom Menace, different Anakin actor. All movies (not including original trilogy). He seems too much like a teen with over-hyped asgst.

Harry Potter 6- More action! There's one scene where they just shoot sparks out of their wands in a field without saying anything! The book had much more cool stuff! Less drama! The Ron-Herminione thing was way over-done. Last 20 min. would be the same, though. In the movie's defense, the book was pretty flat in action.

Shrek 3 & 4- instead of having Shrek feeling unhappy with his life, how about getting him in a reluctant quest like the first movie? Less romantic drama with Fiona. Honestly though, there should have only been 2, maybe a well-executed third.

Agreed with Lion King 1 1/2. Not 2 though. 2 stinked.

edited 24th Jun '12 6:51:43 PM by every108minutes

What? Hayden was decent enough,considering the writing,...which would've been improved if Kasdan was re-hired,....or Lucas convinced Spielberg to drop The Minority Report and help him write it.

edited 24th Jun '12 10:23:31 PM by terlwyth

Kick Ass (2010) - Stick with the actual comic the whole way. It gave the audience the happy ending they wanted while still keeping the brutal realism.

War of the Worlds (2005) - Try to keep the family matters to a minimum, while expanding on the encounters with other survivors and their take on the situation.

Dawn of the Dead (2004) - Bring the character's IQ's up to at least a 105 minimum.

Unknown (2008) - Cut down on the hamfisted romance, that time could have given them more plot to thicken to Memento's levels.

Star Wars prequels: I want to rewrite the dialogue. George Lucas is a great idea guy, visionary, but can't write dialogue. I'd have Anakin state that he rebuilt C-3PO ("Can you believe somebody threw out a perfectly good AA-1 Verbobrain?!") and when the business of his and Padme's unborn child comes up, he'd tell Obi-Wan that he wants his child to inherit his lightsabre. Padme's death should be attributed to the Force Bond with Anakin transferring his pain; we should see the reciprocal agony between them.

Transformers: the US Armed Forces aren't allowed to operate on US soil; strike them in favour of the National Guard. Rewrite Sam's parents to be 98% less dorky and embarrassing. Redesign the bots who need it to make them more unique. It can be interpreted that DotM is Bay ranting that he's an unappreciated genius via Sam's lack of recognition for his role in twice saving Earth from the Decepticons; change that.