Editorial: Money shouldn't equal sequels

By: Robert Acosta

Is it just me or did 2010 seem like the year of sequels? Sequels and remakes. Now i'm all for a 2nd part to a movie or 3rd part and so on. I just don't want the reason why it's being produced to be about money. Because the prior film in the series made a lot of profit, this next movie has to be made.

Now my favorite movie series of all-time seemed to live for that equation. If you haven't guessed it already, my favorite movie series is the Saw series. The profit that the films made were tremendous. The budgets were low and films became very popular, very fast. So, these films, all 7 of them, made a tremendous profit. And it seemed that after, let's say, the 3rd part of the series, the movie was purely going on their big pay day. Now I always argue that all the Saw films have a great story to tell, that interconnect very well. But i'd be avoiding the big elephant in the room if I didn't say that the big profit that they were going to make on another Saw film was partly the reason they kept going.

As I said above, I'm all for sequels. But only if there is a good story to tell. A reason to come back to do another film has to be more than monetary. Movies like Spider-Man 2, Shrek 2, The Dark Knight, The Bourne Supremacy and Ultimatum all are living proof of that. While the predecessors of all those movies did very well financially, you could tell that the reason for continuing the series was about the movie itself, about telling a good story because they all had one.

On the other hand, you have Beverly Hills Cops 3, Caddyshack 2, and X-Men: The Last Stand as you're gold standard of crap for sequels. Throw in Spider-Man 3 and you've got the whole nine yards of bad sequels. They were all obviously working off the successes of their predecessors, but because they all knew the money was going to roll in if they did another part, the story become secondary. When that happens...well...if you've seen the movies I mentioned in this paragraph then you know.

What got me into this topic? I'm not too sure. The news of a Paranormal Activity 3 got to me a bit, as it's seemingly taking the spot of Saw as the annual Halloween movie. I'll always stand firmly behind this point: Money shouldn't equal sequels.