#blockbusters

Top Ten Blockbusters That Didn’t Get a Sequel

It’s May, in case you hadn’t noticed, which means over in Hollywoodland it’s officially Summer Blockbuster season. We’ve already had a few breakout hits this year, from the truly excellent Project Hail Mary to, er, well, I haven’t actually seen The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, so let’s move right along to the recent Michael, which, er…

Anyway, films that make a lot of money are great, aren’t they? And I’d argue the season really gets underway this month with the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first Star Wars film since the universally adored/potentially-franchise-destroying The Rise of Skywalker (delete as appropriate) in 2019. A brand new Star Wars film! I’m excited. Aren’t you excited? No? Oh well. It doesn’t matter, because Hollywood will keep delivering great big stonking, expensive films for us, custom-engineered to give us a good time. And, of course, make a lot of money.

I’ve been “into” film for over thirty years now, reading about the industry and watching a lot of things at the pictures. And it’s been fun in that time as Hollywood has gone from tentatively giving a success one diminishing-returns sequel, to chasing the platonic ideal of a “trilogy”, to trying to establish a huge cinematic universe. Truly, no ambition is too great. And, y’know, I’m being snarky, but I was really excited for everything from Men in Black II to The Matrix Revolutions to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Genuinely! So it makes sense that if there’s something great out there, we’d like a bit more. Sure, okay, every now and again the industry will put the cart before the horse and we end up with Universal’s “Dark Universe” of non-existent interconnected monster movies. But I watched Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice this week, and – no spoilers – it could have a sequel very handily, even though the director has insisted that wasn’t his intention, and I’m not going to lie, I’d be quite into it if they did make Mike & Nick & Nick & Nick & Alice or whatever.

So amongst all the Shanghai Knights and Meet the Little Fockers it’s often quite surprising when there’s a great big movie – especially a good movie, especially a successful good movie – that doesn’t get a sequel. Now, I’m definitely not saying we need to sequelise everything: it’s actually very refreshing to just get a one-and-done story. And, of course, if they’d just stopped at Terminator 2: Judgement Day we’d all have been much better off (apart from Schwarzenegger’s accountant, presumably). But sometimes, like a say, it’s surprising just to get the one instalment of what could have been a franchise. And – hey – in some cases, it’s not for want of trying!

This week, then, to kick off blockbuster season, I’m taking a look back to the films of the (semi-recent) past, and thinking: what could have had a sequel? I’m trying to be realistic here and think of films that had a great premise that naturally lent itself to more stories; I like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I’m not really sure what a sequel to that would look like (er, unless it ends up looking like Disclosure Day, I guess). But very often there’s a cool premise or interesting characters, and you would be up for another trip in that world.

Now, I understand why some films don’t get sequels. A couple of these films, for instance, were considered disappointments – at least financially – at the time of their release. And that’s discounting whether any of the talent involved would want another go around anyway. there are other films, not on this list, that I’d be interested to see another version of – let’s say Wild Wild West, for instance – but I’m not certain I’d like an actual sequel because the first one was, well, a bit rubbish. Or it’s got, like, Johnny Depp in it or something. Also, I’ve tried to think of films that aren’t really a part of some other media already; you might want a sequel to Dredd or The Rocketeer, but those were pre-existing works before the movies came out, and already have a long life elsewhere. These were all – as far as I’m aware – original screenplays. I almost had Edge of Tomorrow on here, for instance, until I remembered it’s based on a comic (which I own!).

Anyway, that’s enough of my waffle. Let’s get on with it. We’ve only got one shot at this…

Will Smith, l’un des acteurs les plus bankables d’Hollywood, a construit sa carrière sur des franchises à succès comme « Bad Boys », « Men in Black » ou encore « Independence Day ». Pourtant, un fait surprenant émerge à l’aube de la sortie annoncée de « I Am Legend 2 » : ce film sera la première suite directe d’un nouveau cycle depuis « Bad Boys II » en 2003. Un intervalle de 23 ans qui en dit…

L’été approche à grands pas et avec lui, la saison la plus bouillante de l’année pour les blockbusters et les séries événementielles. Entre les super-héros de DC et Marvel, les retours de franchises nostalgiques et des pépites originales, 2026 s’annonce comme un cru exceptionnel. Voici notre guide des films et séries qui vont rythmer vos mois de mai à août. Les super-héros à l’honneur L’été…

Building on the success of our list about the Super Mario Galaxy Movie and it’s ties to other Nintendo properties, we are bringing you a new list but with a different twist. This is a look ahead piece to the summer box office where we look for potential flops and discuss the obstacles some of summers biggest films have to overcome. To get the easy two out of the way first, first you have…

Something I keep thinking about is how bad people are at understanding budgets.

I wrote about this before. And yes, this is very much inspired by a vent that @bobokitty posted. But it has been in my head swirling around for like two months now and I just need to get it out.

Y'all need to understand that budgets are mostly wages and salaries. Yes, there is obviously also stuff like materials and food and energy use and what not. But the largest chunk of budgets is just wages and salaries and generally payment for the people involved.

Let's talk about 2D animation. Because I feel that 2D animation actually is a bit easier to understand - at least in an environment like tumblr, where people are somewhat familiar with stuff like commission prices and such.

Let's look at an episode of 2D animation. Those tend to average out on 21-25 minutes of animation. Let's say for simplicity's sake that it is an average of 22 minutes. That is 1320 seconds. Every second has 24 frames, but of course TV animation usually is largely animated on twos or threes (meaning only every second or third frame is actually a new drawing). Still. If we average it on twos, that is 15 840 drawings per episode.

Yes, obviously animation uses a lot of tricks. There will be some shots where we just get a couple of seconds of a background tracking shot where characters are talking over it. Or we see the back of someone's head while they talk, or if we see it from the front we might see very limited animation (like just the mouth moving with nothing else) and so on. So, yeah, it is not 15 840 completely different drawings. Absolutely not. But you also have to keep in mind that still in the end in many places there is more than one character on screen.

Obviously, animation is not quite like artwork online. Stuff goes through a pipeline. I mean, just superficially:

We need a script.

Then there is a storyboard.

Layout/Composition

Key-Animation

Inbetween Animation

Cleanup Artist

Colorist

Someone does the background art

Final Composition

Something like that. And that for every single of the frames. And everyone who is working on that needs to be paid, needs to pay rent, and presumably - given that they are human - also needs to eat.

Yes, the fact that there is a pipeline makes it often a big faster within a single sequence (aka a sequence of animation that is in one perspective and with one background before there is a cut) than it would take if every single frame was drawn individually.

But I feel like most of you will still have a feeling of how much work it is going to be to have 15 840 frames of animation. And of course, while there are a lot of scenes where animation can get away with animating on twos or threes, there is also scenes in which they are animating on ones. Action sequences often just look better when you do that.

There is always a lot of talk about how anime manage to make "better animation than western animation with less of a budget". Because yeah, a lot of anime to this day are done on a budget of somewhere between 200 000 to 400 000. And now just look at the math of that. Even if we said it was animated on threes - 10 560 frames - that is somewhere between 18 and 38 bucks per frame. And... I think we all do understand that this, translated into just the amount of work going into the animation itself... that is just based on underpaying everyone involved.

Especially as - of course - it is not just the screenplay and the animation. The budget also needs to pay for the soundtrack, and the voice acting, and the mixing, and so on. Let's be honest here. The math is not mathing.

Whenever you talk to people who work in western animation, too, you also know this one particular line: "Ah, yeah, animation is sadly so expensive." But... a lot of western shows still are at a budget of maybe 1 million or so per episode. If we assume it was animated on threes, we get a budget of 94 bucks per frame. But also, let's face it, nothing is throughout animated on threes. Most is on twos with some sequences on ones. On twos we are talking 63 bucks per frame.

The reason I am talking about this as 2D animation is because I feel most people understand it a bit better this way. Most people should have at least a rough understanding how much effort there goes into a drawing.

But the same thing applies obviously to everything else.

Live action movies? You need to pay director, actors, people who designed and build the sets, people who designed, and sewed, and fit the costumes, people who do the lighting, and the electricity on set, people who operate cameras and mics, people who do the logistics, people who create 3D models for any VFX, people who do the editing, people who work on the soundtrack, and so on and so forth.

On top of that you also need insurance. You need likely to rent places. There might be a need for some security.

A lot of big budget movies employ hundreds if not thousands of people for one and a half to three years. That is the budget.

Yeah, sure, there is also the four big name actors who on their own get like 30 million bucks each at the very least. But the vast majority of the budget is just the many, many people who all get underpaid.

Same with video games. There was so much talk about how Dragon Age Veilguard had such a big budget and how the game was too bad for that. And I think people do not understand that the 400 to 500 million budget is not Veilguard. It is the budget of Joplin, Dreadwolf, and whatever other cancelled project was in there rolled into one. It is 10 years of keeping a studio of people employed. 10 years of scrapped stuff.

To a lot of people budgets read as this abstract thing. People think that budgets translate to some specific kind of quality.

But all it means is that a lot of people worked on this for a certain amount of time.