We take a look at the Hollywood art of the sequel tease – not least when the movie being teased doesn’t happen…
You can’t put a price, it seems, on the value of ‘pre-awareness’. Hollywood corporate-speak it may be, but the numbers don’t lie. As skyrocketing marketing costs and the effects-driven nature of mainstream cinema forces studios to extract ever-greater profits from international markets, the value of globally-recognised intellectual property has never been more important.
Take sequels, for example. Once derided in the 1950s as a route solely reserved for B-movie schlock, they’ve now grown instead to become an essential element of a high-budget film’s continued life-cycle. Legitimised in the 1970s by a series of classy follow-ups (including The Godfather Part II with its impressive six-Oscar haul), for better or for worse the sequel and its even less imaginative cousins – the reboot and the remake – dominate the box office. Of course, this is Hollywood, and while audiences were still coming to terms with studios’ lust for repackaging successes by adding a number to the title, producers were already finding ways to streamline the pre-awareness process, alerting audiences to the presence of more movies to come before they’d even finished watching the film in front of them.
Eon Productions, with one 007 movie already under its belt, felt confident enough to emblazon the end credits of 1963’s From Russia With Love, the second film in the series, with the bold promise that ‘James Bond will return in the next Ian Fleming thriller, Goldfinger’. He did, too.
It was a tactic that Eon would return to regularly throughout the Bond franchise, helping to develop the sense that the next instalment in the series was a certainty. Eon did, however, mistakenly promise at the end of 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me that For Your Eyes Only was coming next. A little-known film named Star Wars would derail those plans; 007 embraced the science fiction zeitgeist and we got the space-themed Moonraker in 1979 instead.
The wrong universe
Grandly announcing future films before the one playing has yet to fade to black is a strategy that hasn’t always paid off. Surely the most egregious example was Universal’s Dark Universe, a slated raft of interconnected monster movies set to launch with 2017’s The Mummy. Before a frame had even rolled on the Tom Cruise-headlined blockbuster, a (no doubt very expensive) logo proudly announced it as a Dark Universe film, making its intentions as the starting point for a franchise clear. As you most likely remember, it wasn’t meant to be. The Mummy stumbled out of the gate and suddenly the entire Dark Universe project stalled, with a slew of high-budget projects falling forever into development hell.
In retrospect, the rather humbling fate of the Dark Universe was attributed to hubris on the part of Universal; the studio’s belief that a shiny, new logo preceding The Mummy and clumsy narrative world-building could somehow act as a substitute for the sort of atmospheric storytelling that make an audience want to return to a franchise. The particular irony at play here though, was that the studio had had taken two prior tilts at in-film sequel teases with the Dark Universe and The Mummy franchises already, only to torpedo the projects themselves.
Firstly, 2008’s The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor concluded with a light-hearted tease that John Hannah’s character, fleeing to darkest Peru to live a mummy-free existence, would instead find himself at the centre of an Aztec-based fourth entry in the series. Antonio Banderas was set to star as the film’s villain but Universal pulled the plug, preferring instead to begin a reboot process that would culminate in 2017’s The Mummy.
Likewise, 2014’s Dracula Untold left a major narrative thread dangling when Charles Dance’s ancient vampire character reappeared in the film’s final few moments uttering the ominous line, ‘Let the games begin’. Dance had been cast in the role to replace Daredevil’s Charlie Cox (who had already shot his scenes) with the intention that Dance’s gravitas could be used to connect future Universal monster films, much like Samuel L Jackson was used to link the early Marvel movies. However, Universal again pulled a U-turn, opting to shift Dracula Untold outside of the Dark Universe canon, perhaps having doubts that star Luke Evans could effectively reprise the role of Dracula, (undoubtedly the chief jewel in the Universal vault) amid such heavyweight talent as Angelina Jolie, Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp and Tom Cruise.
Of course, Cruise was integral to future Dark Universe movies, with The Mummy’s ending setting up the next narrative arc of his character as he sought to understand his new supernatural powers. This wasn’t the first time the actor had portrayed a supernatural character in a film clearly geared towards sequels; Interview With The Vampire (1994) saw Cruise take on the role of Lestat, a casting move criticised by the series’ novelist Anne Rice. Despite closing with an ending that clearly invited a sequel (indeed, the source material currently boasts 14 books in the saga), Cruise, stung by the criticism (which Rice would later publicly retract), instead returned to action, creating the enduring big screen Mission: Impossible franchise. It didn’t help that co-star Brad Pitt had hated the Pinewood night shoots and being hung upside down for 30 minutes at a time to create his pasty-vampiric pallor…
With neither actor keen to return, no sequel was forthcoming, although a soft reboot of sorts eventually happened with 2002’s Queen Of The Damned. As such, the film’s unresolved narrative conflicts remain just that: unresolved.
Different district
Numerous other films have left audiences awaiting the resolution of a story that may never come. Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 alien ‘invasion’ movie District 9, for example, contains a climax that may never be resolved.
Despite expressing his desire to conclude the story of Wikus and Christopher, the human and alien who learn the value of each others’ species through the time-honoured tradition of blowing shit up, the Oscar-nominated sci-fi action film became a victim of its own success. In its wake, Blomkamp was tempted by a string of other projects, such as Alien 5 and Robocop Returns. Despite no longer being attached to either of those projects, Blomkamp isn’t thought to be actively developing District 10 (as we’re going to bet it will be called) and so the fate of the characters remains, at present, in stasis.
As with Interview With The Vampire, at least the ending of District 9 at least stands by itself. Both films skilfully thread the needle of suggesting sequels could follow, but not in an overblown way. As a result, should sequels never happen, both films provide perfectly-constructed and satisfying open endings.
Other movies have plotted this course too, but with less success, most notably action-driven tales that studios had hoped to spin into lucrative multi-film franchises. 2012’s John Carter, 2015’s Fantastic Four and 2011’s Green Lantern are just three examples of films that left their worlds and characters primed for further storytelling. Due to a lack of audience appetite, those follow-ups would never come.
Even less fortunate are the films that take the riskier path of brazenly promising a follow-up, only to not deliver. Mac And Me (1988) shamelessly ripped off E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, but had neither the charm nor the quality of Spielberg’s classic. Its final moments promised a sequel through a text bubble promising ‘We’ll be back!’ and indeed, a sequel was in the works, up until the film was released and bombed horrendously. It was not in the works after that.
He-Man for all sequels…
The optimistic promise of a cinematic return was also uttered by Frank Langella, memorably emerging from a pit of slime as Skeletor in 1987’s Masters Of The Universe. Again, a sequel was in development, announced at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987 by Cannon Films’ co-founder Menahem Globus. Cannon was in the final throes of serious financial disrepair, however, with Masters Of The Universe director Gary Goddard claiming that cash was so short, crew pay was often absent and the producers were pulling down the set around the actors as they filmed the movie’s climactic duel between He-Man and Skeletor (hence why it takes place almost entirely in the dark).
At least in the case of Masters Of The Universe, the promised return was buried in a post-credit sting after the entirety of the credits had elapsed, in a time when post-credit sequences weren’t anywhere near as common as they are now. So perhaps Langella’s ill-fated oath went largely unnoticed, at least at the time. James Gunn’s directorial debut, the 2006 cult horror movie Slither, also opted to go down the same post-credits route, effectively divorcing what could be a sequel tease (the alien parasite, thought to be vanquished, infects a poor kitty) from the main narrative. Whether purposeful or not, the effect here is clear. A whopping great slab of credits between movie and post-credit tease helps to insulate the film from the perceived success or failure of the sequel tease.
Or it did until 2008’s Iron Man changed all of that. The Avengers tease at the end of the MCU’s debut feature shifted post-credit stings into essential narrative components of a studio’s wider plans, meaning that should one happen to misfire, it could no longer be viewed as some unformed flight of fancy. Instead, it was the sign of a corporation failing to realise its strategic goals, with all of the attendant concerns that accompany such failure, like shareholders raging and people pointing concernedly at graphs with downward lines.
Sony’s The Amazing Spider-Man franchise is one such example. Stitching a post-credits sequence featuring a shadowy figure onto the end of the 2012 web-slinging film, the creative team behind it then opted not to explore that dangling narrative thread in the 2014 follow-up, The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Instead, the sequel included a scene near the film’s end that would double down once more on the mystery surrounding the same puzzling figure, presumably with the intent of revealing his identity in The Amazing Spider-Man 3.
Sizeable production and marketing costs, however, meant The Amazing Spider-Man 2 struggled to match even Sony’s baseline expectations and the studio’s planned third instalment was abandoned. As such, the identity of the mystery man would remain unknown and his nefarious plot to form The Sinister Six, a fearsome cabal of the web-slinger’s most daunting villains, would go unrealised (as would the planned spin-off Sinister Six movie).
Are you worthy?
The art of a worthy sequel tease, then, is surely in finding that equilibrium between an artful open ending and not being too explicit in the promise of more to come. It’s a delicate balance, and one that the rather unloved Alien: Covenant did a sterling job with in 2017. The film’s ending attempts to set up a third film in Ridley Scott’s prequel trilogy, where David, the synthetic humanoid played by Michael Fassbender, can presumably go on to finally close the link between the franchise’s two timelines.
By now, we know that Alien: Covenant never got a sequel, and that Fox (now owned by Disney) opted to make another prequel, this summer’s Alien: Romulus, instead.
Read more: Alien: Romulus | Its ending’s dark implications for the franchise
It’s worth comparing Covenant to another egg-based sequel setup, this time in 1998’s Godzilla, where the film ends by slowly zooming into an unhatched ovum in a destroyed subway. As the egg hatches, the film cuts to black, a sure setup for a franchise-building sequel. Everything about Godzilla smacked of a superiority complex, however, from its marketing campaign where the monster’s foot stomped on a T-Rex (a not-so-subtle jab at 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park) to its boastfully phallic tagline, ‘size does matter’ to its swipe at 1998 rival movie, Armageddon. Overconfidently predicting the size of its impact, Godzilla flopped, and plans for a trilogy were shelved.
So there you have it. The secrets to a successful sequel tease? Don’t go too soon. But maybe don’t leave it too late in the day either, like poor Skeletor. Timing is everything. Be subtle and play it cool so if it doesn’t come off, you can pretend it was meant to be that way. Most importantly? Always leave audiences wanting more. That could be a recipe for the greatest sequel tease of all time… It might even be a lesson for life. Who said movies don’t teach us anything?
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