First movie had a decent budget/talent and was a hit. The sequel is green lit with a lower budget and/or cast. It doesn’t mean the sequel is necessarily bad but little effort/money was put into it. This is all opinion of course! Cheap can equal budget and/or effort. I’ll go with 1958’s The Fly and its follow up, Return of the Fly. The sequel was a third of the originals budget and story wise didn’t have much buzz to it. Sadly, the original director Kurt Neumann died shortly after filming The Fly.
And they cheaped out on using Charlton Heston in the second one and relegated him to a small role. Such a dumb move.
It was Heston’s choice. He actually got a nice pay day (which went to charity) but he didn’t want to be the focus and he insisted his character die. He got paid very well for a what amounted to a supporting role. He had to be convinced to return by Richard Zanuck. He was reluctant to return at all.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture to Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Surprisingly, Star Trek VI had a smaller budget than Star Trek V by 3 million.
It really shows in Battle for the Planet of the Apes, where many of the actors playing apes are obviously wearing cheap rubber masks.
Meatballs 2 was an unrelated movie shot under a different title. It was never intended to be a sequel, until a distribution deal was struck with the agreement that the movie would be retitled as Meatballs 2. Given how low-budget the original was, I wouldn’t be surprised if 2, which uses a few light special effects, may have been more expensive.
I’ll stand on a hill and die on my opinion that Grease 2, whatever someone thinks about the movie (I love it), is better directed and has better cinematography than the original.
One of the better Tarantino-lite movies was SMOKIN' ACES, which featured Jeremy Piven in his best role as the target for multiple assassins closing in on his Lake Tahoe penthouse suite. A very good action film, it didn't do well in theaters but got a second look on cable and DVD. An eventual prequel looking to recycle some of the characters was universally derided for looking like it was shot on the very cheap. KICK-ASS likewise underperformed at the theaters but did well enough as a DVD/cable discovery to merit a sequel. Watching it, I felt sorry for the actors who had done such a fantastic job in the original having to reprise their roles in such a dumb, lifeless installment. I mean, they had to know.
The Sting 2, starring Jackie Gleason and Mac Davis. The Sting, 10 years earlier had a 5.5 million dollar budget. I'd say the cast and script was the big problem. The Ring 2. The US version with Naomi Watts was simply inept. It had a nice 50 mil budget too. The original was 48.
Along those lines.... How about Son of Kong ? Granted, its smaller budget might've still been big money for 1933, so it may not qualify.
Son of King was a rush job (released the same year) and no where near the spectacle of KK. Good example on the thread topic.
But what does that matter when so much else about it is so much worse? The songs in Grease 2, in particular, are not very good. I really want to like Grease 2, but each time I've tried to watch it I haven't even been able to make it through the entire thing. It's just cringe inducing for me.
So the Fly sequel didn't have much BUZZ to it? Yeah, that's a problem if you're making a movie about a fly...
There was a second sequel, Curse of the Fly, with an even lower budget ($90,000 per Wikipedia, which was very small, even for 1965). Oddly, this sequel was a UK production, unlike the first two films, though also distributed by 20th Century Fox.
Midnight Run was followed by three syndicated TV movies around six years later: Another Midnight Run Midnight Runaround Midnight Run for Your Life Not sure if they count since they were not released in theaters Repo Man was a cult hit with a low budget itself, but the sequel Repo Chick looks like it was made for less than it would cost to max out one producer's personal credit card.
This happened to Paul Verhoeven several times: 1. Starship Troopers. Original budget: $105 million. Modest success (mostly on home video), led to a part 2, made for cable TV on a very small budget. Somehow, this led to a direct-to-DVD part 3, which is actually pretty decent, but on a minuscule budget! 2. Hollow Man. Original budget: $95 million. Surprisingly, this was a substantial international hit, earning almost $200 million internationally plus significant video sales. A direct-to-DVD sequel was made, on an undisclosed but clearly very small budget. 3. Basic Instinct. Original budget: $49 million in 1990. A huge international success, it took many years in "development hell" before a sequel was greenlit. Basic Instinct 2 cost around $70 million, which (adjusted for inflation in 2006 dollars) is less than the original. A much less high-profile cast and creative team was used. 4. RoboCop: Although the original RoboCop was made on a modest budget and RoboCop 2 got a significant budgetary upgrade, RoboCop 3 was bumped down again to low-budget status. Also: not Verhoeven, but Sam Raimi's Darkman was a hit movie in 1990 that received two micro-budget direct-to-video sequels.
That was part of a series of Universal television movies made in the 90s that were (sometimes) sequels to feature films. Four of those were Bandit films, with a new version of Burt Reynolds' character (not played by Burt).
