I recently went to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 and about a half hour in I turned to my friend and said “this is actually so painful to watch”. She instantly agreed and we watched the rest of the movie to make fun of how bad it was. There have been a lot of sequels to older movies and while I’ve been excited for some of them, most of the time I feel the same about them as I did for The Devil Wears Prada 2. 

It seems like Hollywood has forgotten how to greenlight an original idea. Instead, they are digging up movies from the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s, dusting them off, and shoving them back onto the big screen. This raises a pressing question for audiences: Why is this happening, and are these movie sequels actually necessary? 

The Financial Reality: Nostalgia Sells 

The primary reason older movies are getting sequels is money. Pure and simple. 

In an era of $200 million blockbusters and skyrocketing marketing costs, studios are terrified of failure. An original movie/story idea is a gamble. Audiences have no emotional attachment to it; they don’t know the characters or the world. A sequel to a beloved older film, however, comes with a pre-installed fanbase. It is a “safe bet.” 

Top Gun: Maverick grossed nearly $1.5 billion worldwide. *Jurassic World* made over $1.6 billion. When studios see these figures, they don’t see “good storytelling”; they see a mathematical equation. In the boardroom, a sequel to a 40-year-old movie is far less risky than betting on a fresh script from an unknown writer. 

The Streaming Wars and the Content Hunger

We are living in the age of “content.” With the rise of Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, and Amazon Prime, the demand for high-profile programming is insatiable. Studios are not just competing for your movie ticket; they are competing for your attention span. 

Older movies are valuable because they act as “brand recognition” in a crowded marketplace. When Disney announces a sequel to Freaky Friday or The Princess Diaries, it cuts through the noise. People know what it is. In a sea of thousands of titles, these legacy movie sequels are lighthouses for confused audiences trying to decide what to watch. 

The Creative Question: Are They Necessary? 

Here is the uncomfortable truth: Necessary? Almost never. Profitable? Often.

From a purely artistic standpoint, most of these older films told complete stories. Gladiator ended with Maximus dying. Beetlejuice ended with the Maitlands saving the house. The stories were closed. Creating a sequel decades later forces writers into narrative gymnastics to resurrect characters or justify their children taking up the mantle. It often feels contrived because, well, it is. 

However, “necessity” is subjective. While we didn’t need a sequel to Blade Runner, we got Blade Runner 2049, a film widely considered superior to the original by many critics. While we didn’t need Top Gun: Maverick, it delivered a stunning emotional punch that honored the original while standing on its own. 

So, they are not necessary for the canon of cinema. But they are necessary for the survival of the studio system in its current form. 

The Nostalgia Trap

The biggest danger of these legacy movie sequels is that they prey on our fondest memories. We go to the theater hoping to feel like a kid again. We want to recapture the magic we felt when we first watched these characters. 

But more often than not, these sequels fail to recapture the lightning in a bottle. They trade practical effects for CGI overload. They swap subtle character development for fan-service cameos. And when the movie is bad, it doesn’t just waste our time, it retroactively taints the memory of the film we loved. 

When Does It Work?

A legacy sequel is “necessary” (or at least justified) when it meets three specific criteria: 

1. It has a new story to tell, not just a rehash. Creed worked because it wasn’t about Rocky punching people again; it was about legacy, mentorship, and finding your own path.

2. The original creator or a passionate visionary is at the helm. When the director actually loves the source material (like Denis Villeneuve with Dune), it shows. 

3. It respects the passage of time. Top Gun: Maverick acknowledged that Maverick was old, outdated, and struggling to keep up. It leaned into the age of the character rather than pretending he was still 25. 

Are older movie sequels necessary? For the sake of art, rarely. For the sake of the box office, absolutely. 

We are living in an era where Hollywood is run by accountants and franchise managers. Until audiences stop buying tickets to these reboots and revivals, the studios will keep making them. It is a cyclical relationship: we pay for the nostalgia, so they feed us the nostalgia.

The solution isn’t to boycott these movies entirely as some of them are genuinely excellent. But we should hold them to a higher standard. We should demand that a sequel is made because the story deserves to be told, not because the spreadsheet says it’s time.

Do you think the movie sequels are necessary? Let us know in the comments!