Movies or Films where the Prequel, Sequel or Reboot was better than the original?

[Aleksej89]

I liked Deadpool 2 more than Deadpool 1

[Volatilis]

Ok the people saying Jurassic World is better than Jurassic Park 1 and Mission impossible 2 is better than mission one need to have their critic credentials revoked.

Best examples of sequels improving apon the first film that come to mind are,

Batman Begins to The Dark Knight

The Karl Urban Judge Dredd compared to sylvester stallone's.

Empire Strikes Back to A New Hope.

Harry Potter and the prisoner of azkaban to chamber of secrets.

Winter solider to first captain America film.

Man a lot of my picks are superhero related....I wanted to say blade runner 2049 as well but that is hugely debateable. As well as Aliens vs alien. I personally prefer Alien.

[Blueobelisk]

Avengers End Game was MUCH better than w/e the fuck that other movie was that had no cohesion at all and randomly switched scenes to give different Marvel casts screen time. It's literally a 180 turn around in the way the story was told, I was surprised.

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I really like The Hangover 2. 1 was okay but it's still sort of slow since it takes time to set characters up. In 2 they have the benefit of being quicker paced since we already know everyone is an asshole.

But I'm sure a lot of movies fall into that description, especially superhero movies.

[cuafpr]

Rogue one > all other StarWars movies

new BSG > old bsg

[Vargulf the Happy Husky]

your quote

all very good points. thank you for your input on that, i love talking star wars.

[Wangming]

Terminator 2 is probably the most universally agreed-upon example of this.

Which is funny because it shits in the middle of both the established lore and basic common sense. Don't get me wrong it is a fun little action movie if you got to the bathroom every time Edward Furlong opens his mouth, but I never really understood all the praise it gets as a supposedly superior sequel.

[Frontenac]

• Ben Hur 1959 was the best remake, nothing else comes close

Well, of course it helps that Ben Hur (1959) was a talking movie and in colour... One thing is sure, the last incarnation of Ben Hur had nothing on the Cecil B. DeMille movie.

________

The James Bond reboot with Daniel Craig was an improvement on the original series. As much as I like the first 20 movies with Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton or Brosnan, I believe the reboot presents a far more believable secret agent with great qualities but also huge flaws and who gets a real beating. I also like that each movie has a repercussion on James Bond's mental and physical health. Of course, he always win in the end, but it's not the superhero portrayed by Roger Moore who survives an explosion without even having his hair ruffled...

Not a movie, but I believe that the new Battlestar Galactica series was better than the original. You really get the impression that humanity is on the brink of extinction. And the prequel they did to that series (with grandfather Adama and the origin of the Cylons) was also very good.

Other remakes that were better than the original:

Gladiator (The Fall of the Roman Empire, 1964)
Homeward Bound (The Incredible Journey, 1963)
King Kong (2005, Peter Jackson): If it's not better, it at least did a good job to revamp the original.

[Novoc]

Terminator 2 is probably the most universally agreed-upon example of this.

Would agree with this.

[Kaleredar]

I love Jurassic Park, but recently I read the book and I feel like Jurassic World actually captures the feeling and the message of the book much better. Jurassic World a surprisingly good film for its time as well, one would expect the entire thing to be just explosions and dinos everywhere with no real story involved.

The corporate angle is more involved in Jurassic World, sure, but... it really lacks the heart and compelling characters of the original movie.

Also... for the time? It only came out like four years ago. Hell, Mad Max: Fury Road came out the same year. And that movie was ALL car chases and explosions but still managed to be a fantastic film.

Yeah sorry but that argument doesn't make any sense at all. That's like saying "If there was no Voldemort in Harry Potter it would be such a boring saga." Guess what, it's the main point.

I mean less that Darth Vader wouldn't be a part of it, and more that... you KNOW anakin is going to become darth vader. So you put up with all the other extraneous nonsense in the prequels (which makes up most of the prequels) because you have that "well, at least he's becoming Vader through all of this..." to carry you through the "I don't like sand"s and Pod Racing and cutaways to CGI characters cavorting that don't serve the plot or characters in any way, shape or form.

So imagine watching the prequels without having the original trilogy. They just don't really work as movies that tell a compelling narrative. Who, other than Anakin, gets any sort of character development throughout the entire prequel trilogy? And even then, Anakin's isn't done gracefully or naturally. The whole prequel trilogy relies on you knowing "alright we're getting Vader at the end of this, so I'll sit through them rolling around on CGI conveyor belts like some video game."

[KOUNTERPARTS]

Terminator 2 is probably the most universally agreed-upon example of this.

This 100%.

[schwarzkopf]

Pitch Black -> The Chronicles of Riddick

[Kaleredar]

OK I don't really agree but I understand what you mean now.

Well I mean think about it... say you didn't know that Anakin was going to become Darth Vader, an objectively cool character, and Obi-Wan, a signficiant character to the original series. You were just presented with this annoying little kid character of anakin and Obi-wan as he appears in Episode 1, where he... doesn't really do all that much.

Would you have put up with all the "now THIS is podracing!" and "I don't like sand..." and "It's because I'm so in love!" and Jar Jar binks stumbling around and pointless distracting scene after pointless distracting scene just to see where the story was going to go through three whole movies? Because, like I said... I think most people would have gone "what the hell was that?"

If Episode 1 had actually been the first star wars movie, and came out exactly as it was... I have my doubts we would have gotten Episode 2 or Episode 3. It would probably have been lauded for its visual effects, maybe had a nod given to its worldbuilding... but then have had the story and characters largely dismissed and fallen into a cult following.


Meanwhile, I think the sequels... well, the first two, at least, I REALLY have issues with Rise of Skywalker... could have worked as a standalone film series, and might actually have been seen as being a bit more original for it. Because, while it takes place in an established universe, Episode 7 takes a pretty big queue from Episode 4 in the way that it exposits this information. And in Episode 4, it's not like we had any prequels to go off of at the time.

[Ayirasi]

Some of the ones mentioned, and...

Some Kind of Wonderful > Pretty in Pink
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

[BrintoSFJ]

Star Wars prequels were better than the originals because they had the moronic Jar Jar Binks! He was the perfect character for a moronic series like Star Wars. The originals were so bad, predictable, bland, that just saying those words about those movies caused me a lot of grief at mere age of 9! I got beat up by my uncle for saying his favorite movie franchise was just crap!

And then came the prequels and Jar Jar Binks! I was like : "Finally! A perfect character for the franchise! A literal moron within pretentious fools who don't get the fact that they are morons!"

The best thing one can do with Star Wars franchise is bundle them up, burn them into ashes and then pee on the ashes! Trash franchise!

Trolling isn't allowed. Infracted.

[kail]

In terms of reboots, the Batman Begins kick-started the best version of the Batman IP.

Fury Road was also excellent. The Kobra Kai series is an enjoyable continuation of the Karate Kid set, I also enjoyed the new Blade Runners as well.

[Kaleredar]

Well I still think the point of the prequels is to be prequels. Yes, I probably wouldn't enjoy them if I didn't know what the follow up is, but I don't think it's really relevant as they are clearly advertised as prequels so it makes little sense to me to try and view them separately. And in such form, I do enjoy them. Very much actually.

But they aren't good films.

At the end of the day, prequel or not, it's a movie, from which I expect the nominal trappings of an interesting, cohesive plot and compelling characters to be considered "good." The prequels do not have those. The prequel part really only tells you that "hey, this is going to embellish parts a story we already know," but that doesn't excuse the film from not being a good film just because some much better movies came after it.

The prequels have a few things going for them... a lot of people saw them when they were children, and have fond memories of them.... which is fine, some people think the Neverending Story is a "good movie" for the same reasons... and the series has since been elevated by other series made much later, after the fact, actually doing the heavy lifting of filling in things like character in a much more interesting way, like the clone wars and rebels series and so forth.

Regarding the sequels, I would rather withhold my opinion because I have very few positive things to say.

Most of the criticisms I heard about 7 and 8 were not actual "filmmaking" criticisms (beyond the insipidly pedantic ones like the perennially groan-inducing 'criticism' of "well ACTUALLY if a ship was going the speed of light and hit another ship..." in a science fiction movie with space wizards, and the like) but rather criticisms of how the films themselves fit within the canon of Star Wars, specifically vis-a-vis the way they take certain characters. To wit... people might not have liked Grumpy old man Luke... but that's more or less the Luke we were told to expect at the end of episode 7. Moreover, that Luke has an entire character arc in Episode 8. I really can't say that for any prequel character other than Anakin, who really just kind of stumbles towards a conclusion we already knew without any real dynamic characterization or insight. Again, whether you thought Luke should have started that way based on your assumptions of where the character should have gone after Episode 6 ended or on various EU stuff isn't particularly relevant to whether that arc exists or not. People had problems with Rey "knowing" how to use specific force things, but... the point of her character wasn't that she was going to "learn" force techniques (we'd already seen that with Luke in the original series anyway, it'd just be even MORE of a retread if we watched her learning to do all that stuff again) it's about her learning the fundamental nature of the force and how that contrasts with Kylo.

But again, I think those things were set up decently well in 7 and 8... and then JJ took a hard left turn with 9 and threw all of that down the stairs. I was actually looking forward to Episode 9 after the end of Episode 8 because all of the characters were left in very complicated places that could have seen some real interesting development.

But nope, they settled on just slamming the characters against Palpatine. Out of nowhere.

I can wholeheartedly agree though that Eps. 7+8 and 9 absolutely don't fit together. I personally think that if the plot of Ep. 9 was actually 3 movies with sensemaking progressing between them (replacing 7+8), the result would be much much better.

I think 9 was a bad idea from the outset. Bringing Palpatine back was just... a terrible decision. Not only does it not fit within the story line established by episode 7 and 8, it actively denigrates what our heroes accomplished in Episode 6 and doesn't leave the sequel trilogy with a satisfying conclusion. Why does defeating Palpatine mean anything at the end of Episode 9, if, with zero explanation, we were already told that defeating him in Episode 6 didn't mean anything?

...I actually still think Episode 9 is a better individual film than the prequels, though. Because at least 9 has interesting individual scenes that eventually don't hold together, rather than every prequel film being literally "well this movie had ONE cool scene in it... just ignore the other 100 minutes of it!"

[eschatological]

I can't even think of one cool scene in the prequels, but that's also because I think the Obi Wan vs Anakin fight had more weight in episode IV than it did in III. Dance battles with lightsabers might look visually stunning (until you realize they're hitting air with all their twirls), but they had no emotional weight or feeling behind them in the prequels.

Maybe there was one good line in the whole prequels, and that was Ewan delivering the "You were my brother" line. But that's about it. Even Obi Wan's utter obliviousness about Anakin's obsession with Padme that led him to that point kind of cuts against the raw emotion of the line.

[kuhntasmash]

I don't know about comparing it to the book,
but I felt
Charlie in the chocolate factory was better than Willy wonka and the chocolate factory.

[bledgor]

Agree with the people saying the Karl Urban Judge Dredd was better, really enjoyed it. I'm not sure if better, but the second RDJ Sherlock Holmes movie was pretty comparable to the first. I enjoy Aliens more than Alien, but that might because I was first exposed to Aliens, both are good. Terminator 2 was much better than 1 in my opinion, Linda Hamilton was awesome.

On a side note, anyone that thinks episode 8 or 9 is anything other than crappy movies, go ahead and block me, cause nothing you can say will be valid in my opinion. They are incoherent, destroy the existing understood laws, had nonsensical plots, and so many horrible flaws I can't watch them even as a bad movie (unlike The Room).

[Kaleredar]

I can't even think of one cool scene in the prequels, but that's also because I think the Obi Wan vs Anakin fight had more weight in episode IV than it did in III. Dance battles with lightsabers might look visually stunning (until you realize they're hitting air with all their twirls), but they had no emotional weight or feeling behind them in the prequels.

Maybe there was one good line in the whole prequels, and that was Ewan delivering the "You were my brother" line. But that's about it. Even Obi Wan's utter obliviousness about Anakin's obsession with Padme that led him to that point kind of cuts against the raw emotion of the line.

People commonly cite the "duel of the fates" scene as being "a good scene from Episode 1," despite the fight having... absolutely zero narrative heft, us knowing next to nothing about Darth Maul, and Qui-Gon's death not really going on to inform anything in the series from a dramatic angle.

I think people like flippy light saber fights, Darth Maul's cool design, and choral John Williams scores. But they use that scene to justify all of Episode 1.

Episode 2 really sees almost... no justification from anyone (even though I'd argue it's really the only prequel where 1) Padme gets to do anything actiony 2) Anakin and Obi-wan work together in earnest and 3) you see anakin actually make progress towards the dark side based on his own feelings in slaughtering the sandpeople for killing his mother,) but I think the sort of "cool scene" people usually go to is... flippy yoda and maybe the arena fight at the end? But again, that's all just CGI spectacle.

Episode 3 has the fight on Mustafar which... much like Episode 1... people like the choral john williams and flippy lightsaber fight. But you're correct in stating that it really doesn't have much dramatic heft because Obi-wan and Anakin aren't really fleshed out characters within the prequel series. They're actually given very little screen time together, especially in Episode 3.

And don't get me wrong, I'm partial to sci-fi worldbuilding... I think a lot of the environments and creatures created for the prequels are super cool. But I know that those things do not a good movie make, nor do they excuse the wooden dialogue and pointless scene after pointless scene.

On a side note, anyone that thinks episode 8 or 9 is anything other than crappy movies, go ahead and block me, cause nothing you can say will be valid in my opinion. They are incoherent,

Episode 9? Most certainly. Episode 8? No.

destroy the existing understood laws,

And force lightning didn't exist until 10 minutes before the end of Episode 6. Did that bother you? How about Midichlorians? Fuck, in Episode 4 we weren't even really shown that the force could move things beyond vader being able to choke out fools. But hey, top of Episode 5... Luke's pulling a lightsaber out of the snow with his mind!

Don't act like Star Wars has ever been hard science.

People that have a problem with the hyperspeed ram or "how could the bombs drop when they're in space?!" in Episode 8 are just looking for things to whine about to justify not liking the movie.

Zero things are "understood" in Star Wars. It's all made up nonsense. And to say that that nonsense, which has been mutable for the entire course of the series, from the original trilogy through the prequels, is suddenly "inviolate" in the sequels is just silly.

had nonsensical plots, and so many horrible flaws I can't watch them even as a bad movie (unlike The Room).

Again... plot of Episode 8 isn't that hard to follow. The Luke, Rey and Kylo stuff stays really focused. That Luke was not who you expected him to be does not mean the narrative throughline of 8 isn't there. All that means... is that that Luke wasn't the Luke you expected him to be. Hell, Luke goes through an entire arc in Episode 8. You didn't like his characterization, but that doesn't mean he didn't have any

I have issues with people misattributing their dislike for the way characters were handled or the nitty gritty of made up space-physics with "filmmaking incompetence," because they're not the same thing.

I DO think that a lot of your criticisms actually apply to Episode 9. And if you want to measure that from an actual objective standpoint, look to the critical reviews of the Last Jedi... which were really quite good, because film critics, people who have looked at and watched hundreds of films that aren't just star wars in an attempt to appreciate the craft of film in general assessed the film as a film and found it competently made, versus critical reviews of Rise of Skywalker, which were really quite poor because film critics assessed the film as a film and found it quite incompetently made.

If anyone fancies themself a judge of film or a person with creative story ambitions, I'd advise an appreciation of the difference. It doesn't mean you have to like Episode 8 at all, but understanding your reasons for actually disliking it instead of blaming it on things that weren't the issues at hand is important.

And yes, I remember people making the dumbass excuse that Disney must have paid critics to like Episode 8 or that critics were too "afraid" to speak out against Episode 8 and in reality hated it but were afraid some SJW cancel cult would come after them. Which is stupid, especially considering the fact that critics rightly derided Episode 9 anyway.

Maybe, instead of some weird conspiracy, Episode 8 is actually a competently made movie that didn't match up with what people wanted in their heads and they were disappointed, and Episode 9 was actually an incompetently made movie because... it was an incompetently made movie. As I said, an appreciation of that difference is important.