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How long is too long to wait for a sequel? It’s a topic I’ve been pondering in the wake of two recent releases that took a glacially long time to reach us. The first was Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, a comeback for Eddie Murphy’s fish-out-of-water lawman whose arrival on Netflix came 30 years on from franchise nadir Beverly Hills Cop 3 The second was Twisters, not so much a follow-up to the 1996 original as an even windier upgrade.
I can’t say I’d been pining for Murphy’s Axel Foley, any more than I’d been craving a return to Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley. But I dutifully saw Twisters and Axel F anyway, quietly nursing the hope that they’d deliver at least a fraction of the feels Jan de Bont’s original and the first Cop had given me.
The former left me bemused, director Lee Isaac Chung having apparently decided that what was wanted this time around was more science, no flying cattle and lashings of survivor guilt. The latter just made me sad, Mark Molloy’s exercise in listlessness being less a throwback to the action comedies of yesteryear than a grim reminder that the sands of time flow in one direction.
It’s a simple equation, really. The more belated a sequel is the more expectations it has to satisfy, making it exponentially less likely it will hit the jackpot. The rare movies that do – Blade Runner 2049, for example, or Top Gun: Maverick – succeed because they honour their origins and offer something fresh to a new generation.
The more common scenario is the unbidden afterthought overly dependent on dewy-eyed nostalgia: a sorry subset where you’ll find such misfires as The Matrix Resurrections, Independence Day: Resurgence, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and... The Dial of Destiny.
Time will tell where Gladiator II, Shrek 5 and 28 Years Later figure in this brutally binary metric, not to mention the Lethal Weapon finale Mel Gibson reportedly plans to act in and direct. When the gaps between sequels start being measured in decades, though, perhaps that’s a sign it’s finally time to put the cash cow out to pasture. Or is it just me?
