Okay, I’ve Had Enough.

The era of the sequel and the reboot needs to end.

Sequels used to be exciting. There’s going to be another movie continuing the story that I love so much? What’s not to like? Not one High School Musical but 3? They’re releasing a second The Incredibles 14 years later? I’m so excited that I’ll be able to experience it as an adult. Those days are over, people! Now, sequels more frequently elicit an eye roll than they do excitement, and there is always some unwanted, haphazard reboot waiting in the wings.

Sequels don’t seem to be a means to tell more stories anymore, they seem to be a means to make more money. Pure cash grabs. And, I’m not naïve, movies are a business, and that business is hurting. Streaming has come in and created stiff competition for studios. When in the 90s someone would go see a movie because it looked interesting or fun and what was airing on TV wasn’t more enticing, that same someone in the 2020s will stay home and watch what’s new on Netflix or Hulu and just wait for that new movie to be released on streaming. The studios have to adapt or die.

Matt Damon, when he visited the incredibly popular Hot Ones show on YouTube’s First We Feast, explained to host Sean Evans why the industry has changed so much: the disappearance of the DVD. In the 90s, we had creative, smaller budgets films (like Damon’s own Good Will Hunting) being made at a greater rate because what money the studios wouldn’t make in the film’s first run in theaters, it would make on the back end with the DVD. But since then, Blockbuster has disappeared, Redbox fizzled out, and Netflix was the reason. Investing millions of dollars into movies with unknown actors and fledgling ideas that won’t bring in big audiences just doesn’t make sense for the studios anymore. But even with all of that… at the end of the day, the art has to come first in a creative industry.

Without it, there’s a dumbing down effect that happens. When we just produce more of what works instead of looking for new, interesting things that could also work we underestimate the audience, and end up losing them anyway. Instead of leaving the audience wanting more when a new idea lands and commencing the search for the next great idea that might do just as well or even better, executives just decide to make more of the exact same thing. We’ll make a sequel of that movie and then also move it to TV and make a show about it, since it did so well. It’s like they’ve forgotten the two most relevant adages for their situation: (1) leave them wanting more and (2) too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

As an audience member, I am highly skeptical of sequels when, as I mentioned before, they used to be incredibly exciting. They used to be even better than the originals! High School Musical 3 is better than the prior 2 (argue with the wall), Cheetah Girls 2 is better than the first and the third, and A Quiet Place Part II is one of the few recent sequels I was excited to see and loved (and I’ll be seated for the third). But even the creator of A Quiet Place himself was skeptical of the request for a sequel!

My biggest pet peeve with this sequel culture is that sequels will be made even if they are antithetical to the thesis of the first movie. Case in point: Magic Mike (2012). Magic Mike is not only an excellent show of marketing: getting butts in seats expecting hot, naked men but actually showing them a story about the exploitative and seedy nature of post-recession, blue collar Tampa, Florida, but it is also a standalone movie.

At the beginning of the movie we are introduced to Mike (Channing Tatum) who has about a thousand jobs to make ends meet. His role as a stripper though, with the titular stage name “Magic Mike,” is where he gets to shine. After recruiting a college dropout (Alex Pettyfer) to join the show, and subsequently meeting his sister (Cody Horn) whom he develops feelings for, we see Mike grow more and more disillusioned with the life he leads, and by the end of the film, he’s had enough and he leaves.

That is until the sequel Magic Mike XXL (2015)... and Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023), both of which show a retired Mike lured back into his old life to either make some extra cash or hang out with his old friends. I cannot stress enough how, after watching the first movie, the existence of a sequel, let alone two, makes absolutely no sense. Mike leaves stripping because he will never gain the equity he was promised by his boss Dallas (Matthew McConaughey) and he knows he will never feel fulfilled being a stripper. But wait, it made a lot of money so we’re going to negate that whole idea for the sake of making some more. What?

And this is just one example. The entire Mean Girls phenomenon is both fun and ridiculous to me. Mean Girls is such a great teen movie that had such an enormous impact on pop culture, so why did we need to spoil it with a (universally acknowledged) terrible sequel, and a Broadway musical, and a new movie based off the Broadway musical? We’ve moved on. No one asked for this.

And maybe they want to justify it in the way that remakes are justified: we’re introducing the film to a new audience. But Mean Girls was released in 2004. The most recent Mean Girls was released in 2024. What new audience? Assuming Gen Z and younger millennials were the original target audience, those groups are still within the age range of people who’d be interested in seeing the new rendition. So, why not wait?

Good remakes, in my opinion, need to be released at a decent enough distance from the original film, genuinely introducing the movie to a brand new audience. Two of my favorites are Footloose (2011) and Endless Love (2014). The original Footloose was released in 1984, 27 years before its remake; the original Endless Love was released in 1981, 33 years before its remake. This is how it should be. It feels like people are talking about sequels or remakes or reboots before the original has even finished its theatrical run. Oversaturating the market with movies and musicals and movie musicals of the same thing is not what audiences want. We’ve officially descended into madness.

And, let me be clear, I don’t hate sequels just to hate sequels. I hate sequels that hold no purpose but to make money. And the kicker is that it’s obvious when this happens, and it’s rare when it works. Movies and TV are meant to tell stories, first and foremost. And sequels made just to make money rather than to further a story cheapen that. When sequels are done well, they are fantastic, but this is becoming more of a rarity, and that should concern both the cinephile and the mood moviegoer. If everything becomes a weak remake or a sequel of something else, there will be fewer and fewer new properties like Barbie or Oppenheimer or The Holdovers or The Iron Claw. There will be no Good Will Hunting, no Clueless, no American Psycho! We will be left with animated remakes of live action films based on animated films and “The Avengers 50: When They All Came Back to Life.”

Personally? I’d rather avoid that fate.