the list of 9 for september 23, 2004:
THE NINE LEAST NECESSARY MOVIE TRILOGIES EVER
Somewhere in cinema history, the idea of the "movie trilogy" was born. Sequels, of course, werepart of the biz since the beginning: if a movie made money, a sequel was almost guaranteed to makesome more. Then Star Wars became the biggest box office smash of all time, and George Lucassaid "Actually, I plan to make nine films - three sets of trilogies." (He later insisted he onlysaid six films.) From that point onward, producers of films ranging from the sublime to theridiculous started uttering that horrid phrase, "We always perceived of this as a trilogy." Nowwe're inundated with them. Some work: Lord of the Rings, Scream, The Terminator, evenSpy Kids. These didn't:

  1. CROCODILE DUNDEE. Paramount's decision to make thethoroughly unasked-for Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles more than a decade after the firsttwo Dundee movies can only be called a cynical attempt to market the films as a DVD box set.

  2. PSYCHO. It's obvious that Alfred Hitchcock had no interestin creating a sequel to his classic 1960 thriller, considered one of the greatest films of alltime. Yet there was Universal, rehiring an aging Anthony Perkins a year after Hitchcock's deathand putting Norman Bates back to work. Worse yet, four years later Perkins not only starred inPsycho III but directed it. (Incredibly, a "Psycho IV" prequel was made for TV, withPerkins - dying of AIDS - in a small part, but we won't count that. It's TV, after all.)

  3. FREE WILLY. I bet a lot of you don't know that there werethree Free Willy movies. I bet a lot of you don't even remember that there was oneFree Willy movie.

  4. RAMBO. In 1982, Sylvester Stallone starred in FirstBlood, a downbeat drama about a Vietnam vet taking his old commander hostage. Three yearslater, the glum anti-hero John Rambo was refashioned as a muscle-bound, Reagan-era superman,saving his buddies from the evil Vietnamese in Rambo: First Blood Part II. Of course thiswas a massive hit and a few years later out came Rambo 3. No, not First Blood PartIII or even Rambo 2. This title is one of the most glaring examples of Hollywoodplaying to the lowest common denominator: You can imagine studio execs saying "But these dumbasseswill get confused if we called it anything else!" Did I mention that in this film, Rambois an ally of the Taliban?

  5. THE MIGHTY DUCKS. See entry for Free Willy.

  6. THE KARATE KID. Though like most "trilogies" on this list,the Karate Kid series was really three entirely different movies with only a cast andgimmick in common, unlike "tune in next time" serials like Star Wars. But itsgestalt-like marketing - "First it was teacher to student. Then it was father to son. Now, it'sman to man" - would have you think otherwise. Note: I am not mentioning The Next KarateKid, starring then-newcomer Hilary Swank, because, well, that was supposed to be a whole newseries.

  7. THE GODFATHER. More scandalous than any KarateKid sequel could ever be, Paramount duped Francis Ford Coppola into adding a third installmentto a pair of classic films that never required a third installment. As this was in the pre-DVDera, it wasn't marketing cynicism but a lame, invented need for "closure" that was toblame, i.e. some studio exec, sniffing easy money and more Oscars, thinking "We can't just havetwo Godfather pictures." Sadly, this bloated, boring, poorly-written conclusionstained the entire Godfather legacy - as did Sofia Coppola's truly horrid performance in akey role.

  8. ROBOCOP. It was a tossup between this, Revenge of theNerds and Beverly Hills Cop for this coveted eighth entry, but I chose RoboCopmainly because, unlike the other two forgettable trilogies, the original film was actually potentand interesting.

  9. THE MATRIX. Had the second and third "chapters" of thistrilogy, shot back-to-back, been as good as the first one, this might have continued the scarytrend of filming sequels at the same time. But because The Matrix Reloaded was such adisappointment that people stayed away from The Matrix Revolutions in droves, it'shopefully killed off the concept of the pre-sold trilogy - for now. Instead, we'll probably goback to safe, unconnected sequels like Legally Blonde 3: The Blonde Leading the Blonde.(Yes, I made that up, don't worry.)

Copyright © Mark Tapio Kines 2011