If Hollywood has taught us anything, it’s that if a film is sufficiently well-received, there will be more of that film. In many cases, that film will be beaten into the ground until we have produced as many sequels as the viewing public can stomach. Don’t get me wrong, some stories absolutely warrant sequels or plan around their existence (Kill Bill) and some films absolutely earn original sequel ideas (Alien), but we also see many cases where they keep making movies long after the series should have ended. Conversely, we also see plenty of cases where a standalone film was good enough to warrant a sequel, and we never actually get it. There’s a few reasons for this, money being at the forefront of them, but you’ll also see plenty of cases where brand recognition or the will of the creators is a driving force.

What got me thinking about this? Well, earlier this year, they produced a Dungeons and Dragons movie, Honor Among Thieves that was met with warm reviews, good word-of-mouth, and a strong advertising campaign. It was also a solid, refreshing fantasy movie set in a wide world where many more stories could be told, either following the same group of characters or by just setting different stories there. The creators expect that the film will not be getting a sequel in spite of the fact that they would happily produce one. Meanwhile, as part of my obsessive October horror movie watching, I’ve been revisiting the Friday the 13^th series, which boasts twelve films (eleven if you discount Freddy vs Jason) that were largely lambasted by critics and which suffer from a wide variance in general quality. So what gives that a good movie with a lot of future storytelling potential is probably going to be a standalone film while the lower quality franchise that largely repeats the same plot just kept going? In this case, the answer is money, and I think we should break down exactly how Hollywood judges these things.

For a sequel to happen, a few things are necessary. The first being that the will to make a sequel and the rights to the film are where they need to be. E.T. never got a sequel because Spielberg chose not to make one and held onto the film’s rights. The second thing is that the film has to make enough money to justify the costs, or rather, to convince the studio that a sequel would be profitable. Typically, this means they need the movie to make 2.5 times its budget, at minimum, for a sequel to be considered. Since the two movies I picked out as examples both had the will, let’s look at the budgets. Friday the 13^th, the original 1980 version, was made on a budget (USD) of $550,000, and it grossed almost $60 million in theaters. I don’t think anybody is surprised to hear that a movie that made its budget back one hundred times over instantly became a prime sequel candidate. The D&D movie, on the other hand, had a much higher budget to cover the more modern costs, better paid actors, and effects, clocking in at $151 million. For all that effort, it made $208.2 million at the box office. While that’s not 2.5 times the budget, it’s still a respectable profit. Or rather, it would be, if movie budgets included marketing costs. I’m sure many of you remember seeing ads for this movie everywhere, because they invested a lot into advertising this film, and many modern movies have advertising budgets almost equal to their production costs, hence the 2.5 number needed to be considered profitable. We don’t have the numbers for the marketing budget on this film, but it’s heavily theorized that the movie actually lost money. And if we assume that its massive ad campaign was even half of the production budget, it absolutely did. We can debate why it did so poorly in theaters (personally, I think the D&D brand is box office poison that left the movie dead on arrival), but once you break down the numbers, it doesn’t matter what the quality differential between these films is. One of them made back its budget a hundred times over, and the other one might have been a net deficit. No questions which one is going to get the sequel.

And don’t get me wrong, these are two wildly different movies from two different decades. It’s not the most fair of comparisons, but they demonstrate the math reliably. Friday the 13^th never made anywhere near the money Honor Among Thieves did, but the budget to profit ratio matters far more than the actual number.

As I mentioned earlier though, money isn’t the only thing that strictly makes a sequel, just the driving force behind it. There’s been plenty of films in the last decade that were sequels to classic 80s franchises that were long since dead; Mad Max, Top Gun, Ghostbusters, you name it. This is where brand recognition comes in. Financially speaking, sequels are safe. A studio can usually expect that if everybody loved and watched a film, they’ll come back for another one like it. The name of the film is integral here, since that’s what tells the audience that this movie is going to be like the old one. Putting these two facts together, Hollywood understands that if they have a good script, it might do better as part of a brand than it would on its own. I mentioned Mad Max earlier because Mad Max: Fury Road, is a prime example of this. Somewhat famously, it was written as an original film starring Furiosa (the actual protagonist whose name didn’t make it into the final title), and Max was added to the film on the seventh or eighth draft of the script, after it was decided by studio executives that the film could only succeed if it was tied to a respectable franchise. The resulting film was great, and preserved much of the original vision, but I think most viewers watching the film can tell Mad Max himself was stapled onto the story at some point, since he’s ultimately tangential to the central plot. Hollywood saw an original film with a setting similar to a respected franchise, and turned it into a sequel because the statistics suggest it is more profitable. Ghostbusters 2016 was in a similar boat, where the film started as a supernatural comedy and was eventually reworked into a Ghostbusters title to ensure more people would see it. I don’t have any evidence regarding Top Gun Maverick, but given the trend, I wouldn’t be remotely surprised to learn that it started as another generic pro-military film before they reconsidered and attached some of the older actors to it for brand recognition.

Much as I’d like to criticize this practice, it works. Fury Road’s $154 budget grossed $380 million while Maverick’s $170 million budget grossed over a billion dollars. There’s still plenty of original cinema being created, especially with the rise of indie studios like A24, and we all know there are still artistic dreams in Hollywood, but from a strictly financial standpoint, this is what makes sense for the studios. Fury Road and Maverick were good movies that frankly earned their box office numbers, but Ghostbusters 2016? It was alright. It was very much one of those 7/10 comedies you watch once and forget about, yet we still talk about it. And let’s not kid ourselves here, we still talk about it because it was a Ghostbusters movie. The studio knew they had an average film that would do okay, but they also knew they could make it a financial success by attaching a brand, so they saw a supernatural comedy starring four comedians and went for the obvious franchise. Of course, it then got overshadowed by controversy and ended up losing money as a result ($144 million budget vs $230 million box office). Yet the Ghostbusters brand is strong, so in spite of that ratio being similar to that of the D&D Movie, another sequel was still greenlit for 2021, and with that one actually making it over the 2.5 rule ($75 million budget vs $204 million box office), there’s a fifth film scheduled for 2024. Even if the money’s not quite there, the brand recognition for these sequels is strong enough that Hollywood will stick by the franchises and keep producing movies, because they know it will loop back around to a profit if they handle the process intelligently; just look at how much smaller the 2021 Ghostbusters budget was compared to the 2016 version.

Which brings us to the final point, budget sizes. It’s no secret that movie budgets have ballooned in the past twenty years, but we rarely consider that the bigger the budget, the riskier the project. Going back to the Ghostbusters example, the 2016 movie had a higher box office payout than the 2021 movie, but the latter had a more reasonable budget, making it the profitable film. To go back even further to my Friday the 13^th example, that film cost less than a million dollars to make. Sure, budgets were smaller back then, but the low budget practically guaranteed its success so long as it got decent marketing and distribution. And even if a film doesn’t have those things, a brand can somehow make it successful. That’s why there’s like thirty Amityville Horror movies. None of them are good, and most of them are direct-to-video shlock, but they’re so dirt cheap to make that a below average number of viewers will still result in their turning a profit.

So what does all this mean? Frankly, I don’t know. Sequels exist in a strange space where Hollywood consistently makes them because they’re viewed as safe. Even though nobody really wants a ton of sequels to their favorite movie we end up watching them anyway because we trust the brand and believe that it will at least be a decent time. The traditional adage is to vote with our wallets and bring about new original films by not watching the sequels, but we have evidence that even if they fail Hollywood will still make another one with a reduced budget to ensure profitability. They are inevitable parts of cinema that cannot be stopped, but that is okay so long as we still have original artistic visions being made alongside them. So don’t feel guilty about enjoying the latest sequel to your old favorites. Aliens, The Winter Soldier, Godfather Part 2, The Dark Knight, Terminator 2, Mad Max: Fury Road, and plenty of other great movies were all sequels, so never forget that their existence isn’t a bad thing. Like pretty much everything, it depends on how they are used.

As a concept, sequels just… are.