There’s a particular kind of disappointment that hits differently than a plain bad movie. It’s the kind that doesn’t just waste two hours of your evening, it reaches backward in time and makes you feel slightly worse about something you used to love. Bad sequels can do that. The worst ones don’t just fail on their own terms. They manage to taint the originals too, retroactively stripping away some of the magic that made you care in the first place.
Hollywood has always been drawn to sequels like a moth to a budget projection spreadsheet. Follow-up films have always been a huge temptation for studio executives, since name recognition and positive sentiment toward the first movie means a better chance at the box office. The logic is clean on paper. In practice, it has led to some of the most spectacular self-inflicted wounds in cinema history. Here are six sequels so catastrophically bad that they effectively poisoned the well for their entire franchise.
1. Highlander II: The Quickening (1991)
Few sequels have wrecked their predecessor’s mythology as thoroughly as Highlander II. The first Highlander was messy but magical, a cult classic that balanced epic mythology with sword-swinging battles and a Queen soundtrack that elevated everything. Fans loved the mysterious lore of immortals and the iconic line: “There can be only one.” The sequel promptly threw all of that out the window. The resulting film contradicts Highlander entirely. The immortals are no longer humans with a nature connection that makes them impervious to all threats save beheading. They are now aliens from the planet Zeist.
The unfathomably awful 1991 flop holds a place high in the pantheon of embarrassingly misguided, wildly opportunistic sequels, reviled with an uncommon fury by critics and audiences alike, but director Russell Mulcahy and the cast have spoken out extensively against it as well. It is a testament to how bad Highlander II: The Quickening is that every other Highlander incarnation just flat-out chose to ignore its existence. That’s something franchises now do commonly, but this was generally unheard of back then. The embarrassing Highlander II: The Quickening presently holds a 0% Rotten Tomatoes rating, making the film series a virtual laughingstock.
2. Jaws: The Revenge (1987)
The gulf in quality between Jaws and Jaws: The Revenge is genuinely astonishing. Spielberg’s original redefined blockbusters and remains a landmark in cinematic suspense. By the time the series limped into The Revenge, it had become an outright embarrassment. The premise alone is laughable: Ellen Brody is convinced that great white sharks are deliberately seeking vengeance against her family. The shark even “follows” her to the Bahamas in what is perhaps the dumbest plot contrivance in sequel history.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, just 2% of critics’ reviews are positive, with the website’s consensus reading: “Illogical, tension-free, and filled with cut-rate special effects, Jaws: The Revenge is a sorry chapter in a once-proud franchise.” Metacritic assigned the film a score of 15 out of 100, indicating “overwhelming dislike.” The film was so underwhelming that Universal hasn’t produced a Jaws film in over 35 years. In an era where everything is being rebooted, that’s saying something.
3. Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
To this day, The Exorcist from 1973 remains a box office powerhouse that shattered the norms for how high R-rated horror movies could go financially. However, ever since then, Hollywood has been practically cursed in attempts to keep the saga going. Every time the Exorcist brand name returns to theaters, troubled box office returns ensue. This was clear as early as 1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic, which garnered disastrous reviews and quickly became a pop culture punchline. Critics ripped the movie to shreds. Although it made money due to hype, Exorcist II pretty much instantly became infamous as one of the worst sequels ever. Its poor performance derailed the franchise for a full 13 years.
Exorcist II: The Heretic immediately poisoned the well around the idea of The Exorcist spawning a franchise. The damage proved permanent in a way few sequels manage. Further follow-ups went belly-up financially, including 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer, a Blumhouse Productions effort for which Universal spent $400 million to acquire a trilogy of Exorcist sequels, reuniting the creative team behind the lucrative Halloween films. That film too underwhelmed financially, and its planned sequels stalled out. With so many box office flops associated with this franchise, the very existence of Exorcist sequels appears to be a non-starter for audiences.
4. Terminator: Genisys (2015)
The 21st century saw a slew of various attempts to get the Terminator saga back up and running as an ongoing series of lucrative movies. Diminishing returns had clearly set in, with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator: Salvation delivering declining domestic box office numbers. Audiences were already clearly weary of more Terminator, yet Paramount Pictures went full steam ahead on another reboot: 2015’s Terminator: Genisys. The gamble backfired completely. This installment brought back Arnold Schwarzenegger in a prominent lead role and attempted to reorient the saga around characters and lore from earlier Terminator installments.
Any lingering fondness for the saga that gave the world “I’ll be back” was officially gone, as seen by 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate doing even worse at the box office than Genisys. There’s no denying that the Terminator saga wasn’t in ideal shape before Genisys, but this reboot fully derailed this once highly revered saga for good. Terminator fans had been burned one too many times. They failed to show up to theaters, and Dark Fate wrote off losses north of $120 million. In the end, all this reboot did was say goodbye to any chance of more Terminator films.
5. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
Indiana Jones’ fifth outing racked up a staggering $387.2 million budget. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Harrison Ford’s last outing as the professor and adventurer, was a massive box office flop for Disney. The film opened to an abysmal $60 million on its opening weekend domestically. In order to merely break even, the film needed to gross at least $600 million worldwide, which it definitely did not. The franchise, once a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, had simply run out of road.
Another factor in the box office underperformance is that the sequel skewed much older than most summer releases and failed to motivate a younger audience to check out the film. Disney’s optimistic view of the film’s appeal led to a massive budget and a subsequent $134.2 million loss at the box office. The failure of Dial of Destiny makes an Indiana Jones reboot less likely, with the iconic character’s legacy at risk. By March 2023, Lucasfilm was reported to have canceled Indiana Jones movies and television series to focus on the Star Wars franchise. Disney confirmed the following month that the film would indeed be the last in the franchise.
6. Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)
The original Blues Brothers was a cultural event. It fused anarchic comedy with blistering musical performances from legends like Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Ray Charles. At its heart was the chaotic chemistry between Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, whose energy carried even the most ludicrous set pieces. When Belushi tragically passed away, the prospect of a sequel should have ended there. It did not end there, and the results spoke for themselves.
Even Willem Dafoe, usually a highlight, is wasted as a cartoonish villain. With a ballooning $160 million budget, the film sank hard at the box office, losing tens of millions and killing the franchise outright. Where the first film was taut and electrifying, this sequel was sluggish, bloated, and almost comically misguided. Sequels have the capability of doing the opposite of building a strong franchise, and sometimes they completely destroy the potential of a movie series. Blues Brothers 2000 is a textbook case of that: a film that didn’t just stumble, it erased the very appetite for more.
What unites all six of these films is something beyond ordinary failure. Each one carried the weight of genuine audience affection and then spent that goodwill recklessly. The lesson, one Hollywood keeps relearning at great expense, is that a beloved original creates a debt to the audience, not just an opportunity.
