For 45 years, Hollywood has churned out sequels to more or less any movie that makes a big enough splash at the box office.
The rationale has always been simple: The fans want it.
Starting in the mid-’70s, with “Jaws” and “Rocky” and “Star Wars,” fan service became the model, the engine, the economic blueprint of the movie business.
Yet it was a double-edged sword.The idea that the fans who made a movie into a blockbuster would line up, once again, for a movie with a Roman numeral after its title that was essentially the same movie, but just different enough to count as the new-and-improved version, turned out to be a spectacularly successful strategy.
Creatively, though, it was mostly a bust.
For every sequel you could name that satisfied expectations, or even (on rare occasions) surpassed them, there were seven others that were going through the motions.
I remember back in the ’80s,
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