Sequel

For other uses, see Sequel (disambiguation).

A sequel (also called a follow-on or follow-up) is a narrative, documental, or other work of literature, film, theatre, or music that continues the story of, or expands upon, some earlier work. In the common context of a narrative work of fiction, a sequel portrays events set in the same fictional universe as an earlier work, usually chronologically following the events of that work.

In many cases, the sequel continues elements of the original story, often with the same characters and settings. A sequel can lead to a series, in which key elements appear in a number of stories. Although the difference between more than one sequel and a series is somewhat arbitrary, it is clear that some media franchises have enough sequels to become a series, whether originally planned as such or not.

Sequels are attractive to creators and to publishers because there is less risk involved in returning to a story with known popularity rather than developing new and untested characters and settings. Audiences are sometimes eager for more stories about popular characters or settings, making the production of sequels financially appealing.

In movies, sequels are common. There are many name formats for sequels. Usually, they either have unrelated titles, such as The Jewel of the Nile, the sequel to Romancing the Stone, or the same title as the original, but with a number added, as in Lethal Weapon 2, sequel to Lethal Weapon. Sometimes such titles have subtitles as well (e.g. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York). It is also common for a sequel to have a variation of the original title (such as Men of Boys Town, sequel to Boys Town). In the 1930s, many musical sequels had the year included in the title (Gold Diggers of 1933), in the style of Broadway revues such as the Ziegfeld Follies.

Chronologies

There are a number of ways that subsequent works can be related to the chronology of the original. Various neologisms have been coined to describe them.

(Simple) sequel

The most common approach is for the events of the second work to directly follow the events of the first, either picking up dangling plot threads or introducing a new conflict to drive the events of a second story. A sequel to the first sequel might be referred to as a third installment or threequel.

Prequel

Main article: Prequel

A sequel that portrays events which precede those of the original work is called a "prequel." These can often avoid the plot problems associated with having to deal with the consequences of the original (e.g. the death of an important character). However, they pose the challenge of maintaining dramatic interest when the outcome is already known from the original work, so the focus is usually on the character interactions or revealing how the characters and situations of the original work developed. Examples of prequels are Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, which is recognized as one of the first film prequels and the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Interquel

When there are already two or more completed works, an interquel can portray events that happened between them, bridging one story to the other. The interquel is therefore a sequel to one work and a prequel to another. For example, the video game Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days was released after Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, but takes place between them. Interquels are often ancillary works in other media rather than works in a popular series. For example, the novel The Godfather Returns takes place between the events of the films The Godfather and The Godfather Part II.

Midquel

A midquel is a sequel which can take place during a chronology gap within a single previously completed work. For example, the Narnia book The Horse and His Boy takes place during the reign of the Pevensie children, which happens towards the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Another example would be the film Bambi II, which starts out shortly after the death of the young deer's mother in Bambi but before the later scenes in which he is an adult.

Spin-off

Main articles: Spin-off (media) and Side story

A variety of sequel that allows substantial creative freedom is one that is set in the same fictional universe as the original work, but with unrelated plots, and sometimes unrelated characters. When done with the intention of launching a new series of stories, these are often called spin-offs. One example of this is the The Cleveland Show, which is based on Family Guy. Screenwriter David Peoples described his film Soldier as a "sidequel" to Blade Runner, which he co-wrote.

Spiritual successor

Main article: Spiritual successor

A spiritual successor is a creative work that is produced as a complementary work to another stand-alone project, but storywise has nothing to do with its predecessor. While a companion piece does not necessarily need to take place within the same "universe" as the predecessor, it must follow-up on specific themes and ideas introduced in the original work. It must also be intentionally meant by its creator to be viewed alongside or within the same context as the earlier work. An example is Letters from Iwo Jima, which is Clint Eastwood's companion piece to his earlier picture, Flags of Our Fathers.

Reboot

Main article: Reboot (fiction)

A reboot is a type of sequel which technically is not a sequel. It means that a franchise begins a new, as if the earlier entries in the franchise did not exist. Examples include the Batman film series with Batman Begins, the Spider-Man film series' The Amazing Spider-Man, Star Trek film series with Star Trek (2009) and The Pink Panther (2006) and The Pink Panther 2 (2009). In television, the 2004 TV series Battlestar Galactica was termed a "reimagining" of the original 1978 series.

Stand-alone sequels

When sequels are set in the same universe but have little connection with their predecessors, the work is called a stand-alone sequel. Examples of stand-alone sequels is the film Grease 2 and the Quake video game series.

History

It is impossible to say for sure when the history of the sequel begins, as the concept of the sequel in its loosest definition has presumably existed since the advent of storytelling itself. In The Afterlife of a Character, David Brewer coined the term “imaginative expansion” to describe a reader’s desire to “see more,” or to know what happens next in a narrative after it has ended. This capacity for expansive curiosity is certainly not restricted to a particular era in human history. Indeed, we can point to Homer’s ‘’Odyssey’’ as a sequel to the ‘’Iliad’’ in the sense that it expands upon plot and character elements established in the first text. That both the Odyssey and the Iliad were written in the 8th century B.C.E. and are traditionally held to represent the first extant works of western literature lends credence to the ubiquity of sequels in literary history. The Judeo-Christian Bible is also a common referent in that sense; many of the works included in the Hebrew Scriptures can be classified as sequels in that they continue and expand on a very general narrative that is pre-established by previous books in the same collection. In addition, the development of an official canon allows for the distinction between official and unofficial sequels; in this context, apocrypha might be considered an early form of informal sequel literature. Sequels, then, become an important facet of Western literature throughout history. The medieval genre of Romance, in particular, contains massive networks of prequel and sequel literature.

Sequels of the novel

The origin of the sequel as we think of it today developed from the novella and romance traditions in a slow process that culminated towards the end of the 17th century (see: novel).

The substantial shift towards a rapidly growing print culture and the rise of the market system by the early 18th-century meant that an author’s merit and livelihood became increasingly linked to the number of copies of a work he or she could sell. This shift to a text-based to an author-centered reading culture led to the “professionalization” of the author— that is, the development of a “sense of identity based on a marketable skill and on supplying to a defined public a specialized service it was demanding.” In one sense, then, sequels became a means to profit further from previous work that had already obtained some measure of commercial success. As the establishment of a readership became increasingly important to the economic viability of authorship, sequels offered a means to establish a recurring economic outlet.

In addition to economic profit, the sequel was also used as a method to strengthen an author’s claim to his literary property. With weak copyright laws and unscrupulous booksellers willing to sell whatever they could, in some cases the only way to prove ownership of a text was to produce another like it. Sequels in this sense are rather limited in scope, as the authors are focused on producing “more of the same” to defend their “literary paternity.” As is true throughout history, sequels to novels provided an opportunity for authors to interact with a readership. This becomes especially important in the economy of the 18th century novel, in which an author needed to draw readers back with the promise of more of what they liked from the original in order to maintain readership. With sequels, therefore, came the implicit division of readers by authors into the categories of “desirable” and “undesirable”—that is, those that interpret the text in a way unsanctioned by the author. Only after having achieved a significant reader base would an author was free to alienate or ignore the “undesirable” readers.

This concept of “undesirable” readers extends to unofficial sequels with the 18th century novel. While in certain historical contexts unofficial sequels were actually the norm (for an example, see Arthurian literature), with the emphasis on the author function that arises in conjunction with the novel many authors began to see these kinds of unauthorized extensions as being in direct conflict with authorial authority. With Don Quixote (an early novel, perhaps better classified as a satirical romance), for example, Cervantes disapproved of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’s use of his characters in “Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha,” an unauthorized sequel. In response, he very firmly kills the protagonist at the end of the Second Part to discourage any more such creative liberties. Another example is Samuel Richardson, an 18th-century author that responded particularly strongly against the appropriation of his material by unauthorized third parties. Richardson was extremely vocal in his disapproval of the way the protagonist of his novel ‘’Pamela’’ was repeatedly incorporated into unauthorized sequels featuring particularly lewd plots. The most famous of these is Henry Fielding’s parody, entitled “Shamela.”

In To Renew Their Former Acquaintance: Print, Gender, and Some Eighteenth Century Sequels Betty Schellenburg theorizes that whereas for male writers in the 18th century sequels often served as “models of paternity and property,” for women writers these models were more likely to be seen as transgressive. Instead, the recurring readership created by sequels allowed female writers to function within the model of “familiar acquaintances reunited to enjoy the mutual pleasures of conversation,” and for their writing to be an “activity within a private, non-economic sphere.” Ironically, of course, it was through this created perception that women writers were able to break into the economic sphere and “enhance their professional status” through authorship.

Dissociated from the motives of profit and therefore unrestrained by the need for continuity felt by male writers, Schellenburg argues that female-authored sequel fiction tended to have a much broader scope. Women writers showed an “innovative freedom” that male writers rejected in order to “protect their patrimony.” For example, Sarah Fielding's Adventures of David Simple and its sequels Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple and David Simple, Volume the Last are extremely innovative and cover almost the entire range of popular narrative styles of the 18th century.

Videogames

Sequels in videogames started in the early 1980s (for example, games such as Super Pac-Man in 1982). As software development costs have increased, sequels have become increasingly important for the video game industry, as they provide a way to resell a product, reusing code and graphics.

Media franchises

Main article: Media franchise

In some cases, the characters or setting of an original film or video game become so valuable that they develop into a media franchise. Generally a whole series of sequels is made, along with merchandising. Multiple sequels are often planned well in advance and actors and directors may sign extended contracts to ensure their participation.

This can extend into a franchise's initial production's plot in order to provide story material to develop for sequels called sequel hooks. For instance, the film Kung Fu Panda begins with Po, a giant panda, somehow having a goose for a father and the story deliberately avoids giving a definitive explanation of how that is possible. Po's quest to answer that question forms part of the plot of Kung Fu Panda 2, which in turn establishes Po and Tigress' deepening relationship and the last minute appearance of a supposedly dead species as story material for the next film.

Box office impact vs. original movie

Although movie sequels do not always do as well at the box office as the original, they tend to do much better than non-sequels, according to a study in the July 2008 issue of the Journal of Business Research. The shorter the period between releases, the better the sequel will do at the box office. Sequels also show a faster drop in weekly revenues relative to non-sequels.

Media shifting

Sequels are most often produced in the same medium as the previous work (e.g. a film sequel is usually a sequel to another film). Producing sequels to a work in another medium has recently become common, especially when the new medium is less costly or time-consuming to produce.

A sequel to a popular but discontinued television series may be produced in another medium, thereby bypassing whatever factors led to the series cancellation. Noteworthy examples include the Star Trek films, Serenity (based on the Firefly series), and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series was continued after ending its run in 2003 for another "season" as a comic book. The Buffy series was itself a continuation of the unsuccessful film Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Gargoyles television series' comic book series, written by series creator, Greg Weisman, was written with a specific agenda to supplant the events of the television property's derided Goliath Chronicles phase.

Some highly popular movies and television series have inspired the production of multiple novel sequels, sometimes rivaling or even dwarfing the volume of works in the original medium. An ongoing series of novels (largely interquels) begun in the 1970s were based on the original Star Trek series, with more following with the sequel films and TV series. The novels and graphic novels in the Star Wars Expanded Universe are sequels, prequels, and interquels to the films.

Computer games are an increasingly common medium for sequels to films. The Matrix Online, Stranglehold, Scarface: The World Is Yours and Tron 2.0 are sequels to the films The Matrix, Hard Boiled, Scarface and Tron, respectively.

Whether these alternate-medium sequels are considered canonical, varies. Bungie Studios, the developer of the Halo video games, considers the novel sequels to be canonical. The novels, comics, video games, and other media that comprise the Star Wars Expanded Universe are divided into tiers of canonicity by Lucasfilm, the films' production company, though the subject is often debated amongst fans. Likewise, novel sequels to the film Blade Runner are authorized and officially considered canonical, but the issue is also a topic of debate amongst fans.

Unofficial sequels

Sometimes sequels are produced without the consent of the creator of the original work. These may be dubbed unofficial, informal, unauthorized, or illegitimate sequels. In some cases, the work is in the public domain, and there is no legal obstacle to producing sequels, for example Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea as a parallel to Jane Eyre. In other cases, the original creator or their heirs may assert copyrights and challenge the creators of the sequels. For example, the estate of Margaret Mitchell sued over Alice Randall's novel The Wind Done Gone, a parallel of Gone with the Wind told from the perspective of the slaves; it was successfully defended as parody. Unofficial sequels to works that are still under copyright may change the names of the characters and alter the settings in an attempt to avoid legal action.

Other examples of such unofficial sequels include:

Novels

• Cosette: The Sequel To Les Misérables by Laura Kalpakian, created as a sequel to Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables. Cosette or the Time of Illusions and Marius or The Fugitive by François Cérésa, were also created as sequels to this novel.
• Psychohistorical Crisis by Donald Kingsbury was created as a sequel to Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy.
• The children novels Le petit prince retrouvé (The Little Prince Returns), The Return of the Little Prince, Les nouvelles aventures du petit prince (The New Adventures of the Little Prince) and Mały Książę i Róża (The Little Prince and the Rose) were based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince.

Films

• Happily Ever After was created as a sequel to Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
• War, Inc. has been described by John Cusack as an informal sequel to Grosse Pointe Blank, as both films are dark comedies which feature Cusack playing a hitman.
• 20th Century Fox's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) was originally conceived as an official sequel to the studio's earlier hit Valley of the Dolls (1967). The first script written for Beyond included at least two of the characters from the original. Jacqueline Susann, author of the original novel Valley of the Dolls, objected to the studio making a sequel without her involvement and subsequently sued the studio. The names of the characters were changed and the actors who were in line to portray them again were released from the project. Beyond ended up needing a disclaimer at the beginning of the film and on all posters stating it was not a sequel, though much of the spirit was in the same vein as the original, with occasional references in costumes and dialogue.
• Return to Oz (1985) was incorrectly thought to be a sequel to Victor Fleming's film The Wizard of Oz (1939), though it was never intended as one.

Titles

The producers of sequels have taken a variety of approaches to titling their works.

In the early years of film, sequels were generally given titles similar to the original and usually made use of the main character's name. When the William Powell-Myrna Loy mystery film The Thin Man (1934) turned out to be a hit, the studio produced several more films featuring the characters, such as After the Thin Man and The Thin Man Goes Home, even though the original "thin man" was the subject of the mystery and not the detective. After the success of A Family Affair (1937), there came a whole series of films starring Mickey Rooney reprising the Andy Hardy character in titles such as Love Finds Andy Hardy and Andy Hardy Meets Debutante.

On the other hand, early sequels in world cinema often lacked any particular naming schemes. For example, the three films in Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959) had unrelated titles: Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), Aparajito (The Unvanquished), and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu). Similarly, Akira Kurosawa's Sanjuro (1962) also had an unrelated name from its predecessor Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) (1961). Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy also lacked a naming scheme for its titles: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966).

The James Bond franchise stuck to the titles of Ian Fleming's novels until they ran out, then fashioned new titles with similar forms, none of which use the name "James Bond 007" or a number. The Pink Panther series started out with a different title for each (The Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark, Inspector Clouseau) in the 1960s. When the series was later resumed, the new approach was to append phrases to The Pink Panther, many of which came from classic horror films, i.e. Son of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Curse. Even if the actual Pink Panther diamond that the series takes its name from is not involved in a given sequel, they were named The Return of the Pink Panther, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Revenge of the Pink Panther, Trail of the Pink Panther, Curse of the Pink Panther, and Son of the Pink Panther to clearly associate them with each other.

Numbered sequels (particularly using Roman numerals) became very popular in films and video games in the 1970s and 1980s. The Godfather Part II (1974) was the first major motion picture to use Part II in the title, and its success began a trend of numbered sequels, the titles simply adding a number to the title such as French Connection II (1975), and the trend continued with films such as Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), Jaws 2 (1978), Rocky II (1979), and Halloween II (1981). Occasionally, a homophonous word is substituted for the number, such as in the case of Look Who's Talking Too, the sequel to Look Who's Talking, or the upcoming film Fletch Won, which is a prequel to the film Fletch. As sequels developed a reputation of being inferior to the original works, the numbering of sequels became less common, or sometimes used for humorous effect. Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult is simply the third in the Naked Gun series. Leonard Part 6 had no predecessors, while History of the World, Part I was made with no intention for a sequel. Many sequels use subtitles instead of numbers or in addition to them, such as Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Underworld: Evolution, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. In other cases, sequels use titles similar to their predecessors, such as Analyze This sequel Analyze That, Meet the Parents sequel Meet the Fockers, and Night of the Living Dead sequel Dawn of the Dead. Some such titles give a playful nod to the numbering practice, as with The Whole Nine Yards sequel The Whole Ten Yards, 101 Dalmatians sequel 102 Dalmatians, or Ocean's Eleven sequels Ocean's Twelve and Ocean's Thirteen.

Throughout this period of numbered sequels, like-named sequels remained somewhat popular, and sometimes the original film was renamed when it was released on home video to match the naming of the sequels. What was once known as Star Wars is now known as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Similarly, Raiders of the Lost Ark is known in its current video release as Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark to better align it with its prequel and sequel, and the DVD of Pitch Black was renamed The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black to help promote it as a predecessor to its sequel The Chronicles of Riddick.

With the rise of pre-planned series such as The Lord of the Rings, filmmakers turned more to long titles that include the franchise name and the title of the film separated by a colon. Examples of these include Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Sequel-naming in translation varies. Following the success of Home Alone in Germany (German title: Allein zu Haus, or Alone at Home), some of Macaulay Culkin's other films were retitled to capitalize on the success (Uncle Buck became Allein mit Onkel Buck, or Alone with Uncle Buck), even though the two films were not linked in the same continuity. When Dawn of the Dead was released in Italy under the title Zombi, a similar but unrelated Italian film was in production, which was released as Zombi 2.

Numbers in the titles of sequels sometimes indicate the order in which the sequel was produced, regardless of the chronological events in the story. For example, the video game Devil May Cry 3 was the third title in the Devil May Cry series to be produced, though it is a prequel that takes place before the events of Devil May Cry and Devil May Cry 2. Devil May Cry 4 is set between the original game and Devil May Cry 2. However, while the sequel to the Japanese movie Ring was called Ring 2, the subsequent prequel was Ring 0.

Occasionally a work is designated as a sequel to an unrelated but similar work strictly for marketing purposes. After releasing the computer game Quake, developer id Software decided to name its next game Quake II, despite the fact that the two games' stories are completely unrelated. Quake III is also unrelated to either of the previous Quake games, although Quake 4 continues the story of Quake II. A further example is Capcom's Street Fighter 2010, which had nothing to do with any of the other Street Fighter games.

In recent years, many sequels have been given the name of the title character, to imply a new beginning for a series. This is commonly known as a "Stallone," for the actor who has given such outstanding examples of this nomenclature. The sixth Rocky film was titled Rocky Balboa; the fourth Rambo movie, following on from First Blood, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Rambo III was called Rambo in North America and John Rambo in many, but not all, international markets. Another example of a film to utilize a "Stallone" is the sixth St Trinian's film, titled St Trinian's. In a similar trend, the third sequel to The Fast and the Furious was simply named Fast & Furious, while the fourth sequel to Final Destination was named The Final Destination.

Yet another form of titling is the use of the plural version of the original work's title, as in Aliens, the sequel to Alien, and Predators, a sequel to Predator.

Though very seldom, a proper sequel, and not a reboot, may have exactly the same title as the original work, with none of the variations mentioned above. The 2009 film Star Trek, is one such case; by means of a time travel plot it is at once a prequel, sequel and reboot to the 1960's television series of exactly the same name. An even clearer example is the 2011 film The Thing, which is a prequel to the 1982 film with the exact same title. Likewise, the 2006 video game Sonic the Hedgehog is set later in the same continuity as the first game in the series, 1991's Sonic the Hedgehog. This is slightly more common in the world of music - artists as varied as Led Zeppelin, Weezer and Peter Gabriel have all followed up successful self-titled albums with another by the same name. Fans typically refer to them either by numerals (e.g., Led Zeppelin IV, Peter Gabriel 3) or by cover artwork content (e.g., The Green Album or Melt).

See also

• Cliffhanger
• Film series
• List of video game franchises
• List of film sequels by box-office improvement
• List of the longest gaps between film sequels
• Prequel
• Spiritual successor
• Tetralogy
• Trilogy

Further reading

• Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Constantine Verevis (2010), Second takes: critical approaches to the film sequel, SUNY Press, ISBN 9781438430294

External links

• Slate: "The Midas Formula (How to create a billion-dollar movie franchise)"
• Box Office Mojo: Film franchise earning comparison