Speculative fiction is replete with spinoffs.
It’s not a new phenomenon; when King Kong took the world by storm in 1933, the studio cranked out a Part II the very next year. In literature, sequels go back at least to the Epic Cycle of ancient Greece; The Odyssey is a sequel to The Iliad, which, by the way was part of a larger arc; the Bronze Age’s equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where different authors wrote books on different parts of the Trojan War. Homer appears to be the only writer to have done two books in the series, and his contributions were regarded by the ancient world as the best of the bunch; however, we’ll likely never be able to judge for ourselves, since those other books are lost to history; destroyed and forgotten over time, invasions, the burning of libraries, the collapse of empire… books tend to get lost. I do hold out hope, though; new techniques to attempt reading the iron in ancient ink is making it possible to begin deciphering scrolls from Pompeii and Herculaneum, so may, just maybe, we’ll find other books in the series. Or other books, period. The destruction of literature is one of the great crimes in the universe.
Even then, there were sequels before Homer. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of my all-time favorite stories, but it was not the first in that series, either; there were earlier episodes on previous god-kings of Uruk, like The Epic of Lugalbanda; we only have fragments of these, so there’s a chance we may eventually find the completed versions; we just need to fund more archaeological excavations, and you know… stop blowing each other up.
So the sequel is not a new phenomenon. But, just as zombies went from being slow-motion shamblers to suped-up sprinters, it’s become a rabid industry in more modern times. Modern Hollywood is all about sequels.
And sequels usually suck.
Astoundingly so. Even if made by the same creative team responsible for the original.
Not only that, they tend to undo everything that made the original great. There’s a thoughtlessness at best, an obscene ego at worst, at play here. There’s the cold calculus of corporate bean counters who generally are incapable of understanding what makes a movie good; producers tend to look at art as an assembly line product, like in that I Love Lucy episode with chocolates rushing down a conveyor belt.
One of my go-to examples is the difference between LOTR and The Hobbit trilogies. LOTR (especially Fellowship) were excellent films where the characters existed in a world of recognizable physical laws; when they fall they get hurt. Yes, there’s magic and monsters, but the characters behave in ways we would expect; hence, Middle Earth felt like a real place, and the overall product was reasonably faithful to Tolkien’s source material. Flash forward to The Hobbit, and we enter a world of bombast and cartoonish physics, where people can fall hundreds of feet without shattering open like eggs, and where a barrel-ride down a river is like a hyper-caffeinated cartoon. CGI isn’t used with restraint, but is dumped over every frame. Few things look real because few things are real. A charming source material is stretched out (as my friend Jay Novella of the SGU put it so well, quoting Tolkien, “stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
Also in the prequel department, Prometheus is perhaps the most glaring example: pulling apart the Alien mythos: the space jockeys, which were immense biomechanical entities are suddenly “reimagined” as buff, albino humanoids. The xenomorphs are snake-like things in thermoses. And the writing is thoughtless and lazy. Consider: disparate archaeological sites are used to point the way to another planet that contains an alien civilization. So a team of “specialists” are sent across space to investigate. They achieve the journey. They discover the ruins of an alien culture. They even find functioning video records. Wow! But then they learn that the aliens themselves are long dead.
And they’re all devastated by this news. The entire mission is a failure! They’re so depressed that they’re drinking themselves into oblivion.
Really?
You successfully reached another planet, found proof of advanced civilizations, have records that will keep people occupied for decades, and discovered that the planet itself somehow has exactly the right oxygen levels, mercifully bereft of dangerous microorganisms which you basically assumed before taking your helmets off, even though in 1979’s Alien this was a volatile planet that required constantly wearing a life-support support…
…and you think this mission is a FAILURE?
This is quintessential bad writing. And yet somehow, it’s not as bad as the Star Trek reboots from JJ Abrams.
So how DO you make a good sequel or prequel? This is the subject of the episode “How to Make Sequels and Prequels” on Space Station Squid.