A comprehensive guide to legacy sequels, their evolution, and the factors that make them successful or disappointing.
A typical sequel is usually a part 2 to an ongoing story, or at least most good sequels will feel like a useful new "part" of an already-established story.
Sequels might be planned in advance, or they might be made because people responded well to something that was originally conceived as a standalone movie. Legacy sequels aren’t usually planned out in advance, unless creatives do somehow foresee picking up a story many years later. Legacy sequels usually come out after enough time has passed for the originals to feel nostalgic, so gaps of 20 or even 30 years can sometimes be found.
There’s usually a passing of the torch, with older characters usually (but not always) appearing in supporting roles, rather than lead ones, or maybe sharing screen time fairly evenly with a new generation of characters. Something like Mad Max: Fury Road was released decades on from the previous film, but felt like something new and not really nostalgic, so it was more of a revitalization or even a reboot than a legacy sequel.
With legacy sequels specifically, there are probably more disappointing ones (like the last two Tron movies and the new Ghostbusters films) rather than genuinely great ones, but some are honestly quite good, even if they’re sometimes broad and play heavily on audience nostalgia. 8 'Final Destination Bloodlines' (2025) A horror/thriller/mystery series about death coming for everyone might sound kind of heavy-going, but the Final Destination movies typically try to make the morbidity of it all entertaining. The best ones are more than a little tongue-in-cheek, and even the worst ones still have mindless/over-the-top carnage to keep you somewhat entertained.
The most recent film, at the time of writing, is arguably the best in the series, too: Final Destination Bloodlines. This one’s about legacy, though it does dip away from typical legacy sequel territory in the sense that there aren’t many characters who reappear.
Then again, most of them die in the movies they’re introduced in. Final Destination Bloodlines finds some decently entertaining ways to build on ideas already established in the previous films, all five of them released much earlier (between 2000 and 2011), and does bring back Tony Todd as William Bludworth one final time, who was the closest thing the series had to a recurring character (unless you count Death itself as a character; the central antagonist, in effect). 7 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' (2015) Say what you want to about where the trilogy it kicked off eventually went, but for a time, Star Wars: The Force Awakens was pretty good.
It’s still pretty good, and certainly entertaining, just a little less admirable in hindsight, because of Star Wars over-saturation and a lack of planning for the whole sequel trilogy. And this film also did quite a lot to popularize the idea of a legacy sequel, because you’ll notice most of the ones mentioned here came out post-2015.
There’s one other legacy sequel from 2015 that’s better than The Force Awakens, though The Force Awakens is better than Jurassic World, also from that year, if it counts as a legacy sequel... it might admittedly be more of a Mad Max: Fury Road situation, though, owing to that film not really having any major characters from past movies coming back in some capacity.
In any event, this first post-Disney Star Wars movie is entertaining and was, for a time, sufficiently crowd-pleasing, so it’s worth at least a mention here. 6 'The Color of Money' (1986) If not the earliest legacy sequel, then The Color of Money might well be the first genuinely good one, serving as a follow-up to The Hustler exactly a quarter of a century on from that movie’s release. Paul Newman returns as Fast Eddie, and is more of a mentor this time around to Tom Cruise’s character, who naturally was not in The Hustler, since Cruise was born in 1962 and all.
Tom Cruise was also in Top Gun the same year, and that movie itself got a noteworthy legacy sequel eventually, but that’s getting a bit ahead of things. The Color of Money does a lot of things right, as a sequel to a classic, even if it never quite surpasses said classic.
It’s a good sports movie, Newman and Cruise make for a good duo, and Martin Scorsese, as director, brings a little by way of extra prestige and style to the whole thing. 5 'Scream' (2022) As was the case with The Force Awakens, Scream (2022) – not to be mixed up with Scream (1996), despite annoyingly having the exact same title – isn’t as much fun today as it was on release. There was some sense of direction and things being new/exciting here, and Scream VI was an honestly pretty good follow-up, but then there was behind-the-scenes drama, firings, and, eventually, a disappointing Scream 7 released in 202
Sequels Legacy Sequels Star Wars Mad Max The Force Awakens The Color Of Money Final Destination Bloodlines The Hustler Scream Tom Cruise Paul Newman Martin Scorsese
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