BitterCon: Three Strikes and You're Out

This is pretty fanboyish, but.....
RETURN OF THE JEDI RULES !!!!!!!!

I like X-Men 3, Return of the Jedi is pretty damn good, and Matrix 2 sucked worse than Matrix 3.

Jurassic Park 3 was certainly head and shoulders over 2.

YMMV as always.

Naked Gun 3 was better than Naked Gun 2. (The opening sequence was priceless if you'd seen Untouchables.)

Star Wars prequels: 1 was actually better than 2, although when I first saw it I thought 2 was better than 1. 3 was interesting, and would have been better if 1 and 2 hadn't come before it....

Lord of the Rings : Return of the King was just as solid as all the rest.

Titanic 3 : It Sinks Again was better than Titanic 2 : Raise the Titanic. (Huh?)

-Rob

The 3's are not always bad. I get mad at the 2's, as they just leave you hanging for two years for #3.

I still remember the second Star Wars, the one dude gets his hand cut off, one is frozen in linoleum, and the babe is being accosted by a large slug, and the lights come up. "Come back in 3 years....". Ta heck wit dat!

You really start losing quality when you get to things that go past 3.

and the babe is being accosted by a large slug,

That didn't happen until 3, actually....

You really start losing quality when you get to things that go past 3.

Counter-examples : Star Treks IV, VI, and VIII; several Bonds, including Casino Royale; Titanic 4 : Titanic in Orbit.

-Rob

Lord of the Rings : Return of the King was just as solid as all the rest.

Wasn't principal photography, for all three movies, done at the same time?

All in all, Jackson did a decent job with LotR. One could nitpick some of his screenwriting decisions, but I've got to be aware of my baises, I first read the trilogy in '68

I'll second LoTR, and also point out that the second Indiana Jones was by far the worst.

Pretty obvious, ain't it? There's a variety of reasons, of course, but the two most noticeable are milking and talent drift.

The Matrix sequels are a great example of milked movies, where the plot was literally raped to create the need for a sequel where there really wasn't one.

X-Men and Superman are rather good examples of the talent drifting away. Superman III didn't have the series' usual script-doctor, as well as a shoddy director, a lack of Gene Hackman, and deteriorating behind-the-scenes relationships. X-Men 3 lost both Bryan Singer and David Hayter (Solid Snake!), that I know of. Probably some other behind the scenes talent, too.

Spiderman 3 doesn't really fit in either mold, in that it's really, really bad while retaining pretty much all of the original talent, and I'm pretty sure it was intended from the start to be a long standing franchise. Personally, I attribute its failure to Raimi either losing interest or being blinded by his own hard earned box office success.

And Return of the Jedi was bad, but the rest of series wasn't much better. So there.

Non-suckular logic:

Back to the Future 3; Godfather 3.

Movie #1: The auteur is given a crappy budget and management turns its back on the pending disaster. Fantastic movie! Big income/cost ratio!

Movie #2: Management dumps in money and takes an active interest (meddles) in the product. DCF/ROI projections are not met (movie revenues do not exceed the US GNP).

Movie #3: Management doubles down and takes over. The product is inflated crap.

Star Wars III (Episode VI) shows how Lucas completely lost his nerve. Dead Darth Vader should have horribly roasted in Hell. In no Grimm's fairy tale (prior to bowdlerization) does everybody get off scot free. Villainy is always repaid with interest.

Jurassic Park 3 was certainly head and shoulders over 2

That's like asking for a pardon for your murderous son because he isn't Jack the Ripper.

Rocky III wasn't nearly as good as the first 2, but wasn't dreadfully awful either like the ones that followed.

For my money Indiana Jones III was the best of the bunch. I always thought the first was overrated.

Star Trek III was OK, not nearly as good as the even films (the only ones anyone should go to any trouble to see), nowhere near as dreadful as the rest of the odds. Star Trek stands out as one of those rare series where the first episode was far worse than the II, III, or IV.

Hannibal rising (III) has been pretty interesting so far, but I've not finished it.

Just saw Pirates 3 after a popcorn-filled afternoon with 1 & 2. The third was surprisingly the best of the lot. Look, an undead monkey!

The second is usually the worst, because of the giant cliff hangers. This also happens in video games. See: Halo(it literally ends in the middle of a scene).

The second is usually the worst, because of the giant cliff hangers. This also happens in video games. See: Halo(it literally ends in the middle of a scene).

As pointed out in #6, LoTR was almost unprecedented in that all three parts were filmed as a single production, then released to theaters in installments. In an interview, Jackson reported that when he felt close to burning out from the grueling schedule, he would wake up early in the morning and ask himself

"What am I doing?!"

"Directing 'The Lord of The Rings'."

"Is there something *else* I would rather be doing?"

"Errmm... No."

Back to the Future II&III, mentioned earlier, were also filmed concurrently, but only after the success of the original film.

JVP, Back to the Future 3 was absolutely a good movie.

However Godfather 3 is usually the first example I see people give when they talk about the third movie in a good series being bad.

Bah. All the Star Wars movies suck rancid yak testicle.

I disagree with Rob Knop on the third Naked Gun, which I thought was the weakest (although still pretty good).

Batman Forever was OK (although I far preferred Keaton as Batman).

Talent drift and milking are big problems, but you also get a loss in quality from the finality of the third movie. People involved cram everything they think is cool into the third film, because it's in all probability the last, at least for the original creators. So no one ever thinks maybe we don't need the Riddler and Two-Face, Or the guy made of sand and the alien goo and the bratty son of the first villian. Or the long detour on the Planet of the Teddy Bears, simply because it was in the original idea.

Couple that with the desire to be more spectacular than the original's ending, (Which if the creators were actually capable of doing, they would have done it in the first film) and you get an inevitable letdown. And then a fourth movie. With Bat-nipples.

The third Harry Potter film was best so far (but that may be because the third book was probably best so far).

"As pointed out in #6, LoTR was almost unprecedented in that all three parts were filmed as a single production, then released to theaters in installments."

It's not like they were sitting on them - after the filming they did all the post-production and (importantly) CGI.

Something else to consider.

Mostly sequels get made when the previous movie does well. Which means that usually you only get the second movie when moviegoers like the first movie, and only get the third movie when moviegoers like the second movie, etc.

There's a balancing act between not being too "different" and not being too "similar" to previous movies. And I suspect it tends to get tougher as you add more movies to the series.

Especially since a large portion of the audience for the sequels is going to be the people who liked the first movie.

CUBE (1997), the first feature film from 28-year-old Canadian auteur Vincenzo Natali, was followed by Cube 2: Hypercube (2002), and then the third of the series was the prequel deviously named Cube Zero (2004), written and directed by Ernie Barbarash.

The first film was a remarkable original low-budget combination of science fiction and horror. The second had a bigger budget, but was a step down in quality. The third, in my humble opinion, returned to the creepiness of the first, tied up loose ends, answered questions, and thus made it clear the the trilogy was actually science fiction and not mere sci-fi.

Cube Zero won the New York City Horror Film Festival in 2004 for Best Special Effects; won the 2004 Screamfest Festival Trophy, Best Make-Up, and Best Special Effects; was nominated for the 2005 Directors Guild of Canada DGC Craft Award, Outstanding Achievement in Picture Editing - Feature Film. So I am not alone in saying that this was a 3rd film that did not suck.

Also, a rare mathematics film (related to the hypercube thread of this blog) with a clearer narrative than "pi" albeit less effective for mainstream audiences than "A Beautiful Mind." The working title of Cube Zero was Cube à (I don't know if that symbol for the null set appears in your browser).

That's not really fair to Return of the Jedi. I thought it was best of the original trilogy. Then again, Revenge of the Sith was the worst of the unspeakably bad new trilogy.

I think the prequel trilogy was poorly thought out, right from the beginning. We all knew how the third movie had to end. The only way to keep it interesting was to make the lead-up interesting. But the climax was given away by the end of the second movie. The rest was predictable.