The Problem with Legacy Sequels

(This article contains spoilers connected to the recent reboots of the Scream, Star Wars, and Blade Runner series...please read only if you're comfortable with that)

I have recently filled in one of the bigger gaps in my viewing filmography by finally seeing the Scream movies in the past month.  This is in connection to a series we're going to do later in the year on the blog (no more spoilers than that), so I won't be sharing my full opinions on the franchise until then, but I wanted to point out right now that I'm a fan, and I'm a hard sell on slasher horror films so this was an exciting discovery for me.  While I don't find them to be as hard for me to watch as certain other genres (namely body horror, sports movies, & musical biopics, my triumvirate of kryptonites), it's not a genre that I've gone to because I live alone & don't need that kind of paranoia every time I wake up in the middle of the night.

But I liked the Scream movies, and get why people are obsessed with them.  They're funny, they're clever spoofs of the genre, and the first one was genuinely groundbreaking.  They also have some great performances, particularly from lead actresses Courteney Cox & Neve Campbell.  The latest film, which we're going to call Scream 5 both because that's what it should've been called AND because it'll be confusing if we don't, I was curious how it would unfold.  At this point in the series, the three main characters (Cox's Gale Weathers, Campbell's Sidney Prescott, & David Arquette's Dewey Riley) have been through it all, but honestly, so had the story.  We'd seen the initial sendup of the series, the way that the second movie talked about sequels (more blood, more violence, more major character deaths), and then the misguided third film's attempt to cap the series (which, in the wake of the Columbine shootings, was far less violent than I suspect Wes Craven initially intended).  The fourth film I liked, both because I thought the twist was the best since the first film & because it seemed to care about the side characters again (Hayden Panettiere's Kirby being the best new addition to the franchise since the first movie), but the fifth film felt darker, and like it needed to raise the stakes.

Scream 5 did that about halfway through the film, when they broke the only rule that the other four films had insisted on (at least without saying it out loud)-that you don't kill one of the three original characters.  The film makes it super creepy & particularly meta as they have Dewey, at this point safely out of harm's way, go back to murder the killer by shooting them in the head, which has been a running joke throughout the films to that point (because the killer always comes back to life unless you shoot them in the head).  Instead, Dewey ends up dying himself, with the killer jumping back and overpowering him.

The film handles this well, and rings the death of an iconic character for what it is is worth.  The scene is the most terrifying one since the original, particularly when the killer says "it's an honor" as they kill Dewey, as if they are defeating the final boss in a video game, someone no one else has been able to beat.  This ends up being largely the motive of the films (people obsessed with rebooting the fictional Stab movies), so it works within the confines of the movie...but it also feels cheap in retrospect in the way that a lot of the recent trend of legacy sequels have.

We've seen repeatedly that legacy sequels have been profitable for Hollywood (the recent Scream movie was a massive success, basically guaranteeing a sequel), but it also comes at a cost.  With the exception of maybe Mad Max: Fury Road, no recent legacy sequel has really gotten most of its strength from the new characters rather than from bringing back the old characters (editor's note: I haven't seen Top Gun: Maverick yet, though I have every intention of doing so in the coming weeks & I hear it's great).  Star Wars, Ghosbusters, Spider-Man, The Matrix, Blade Runner...the best moments in these movies involve the established characters.

In doing this, though, they end up having to do things to these characters that risks the legacy of the films.  Star Wars is the best example of this.  It is shocking in the film to have to deal with the death of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, & Leia Organa, basically watching an entire generation's childhood washed away, and us seeing the deaths of three of the most important films in modern movie culture.  But while these are powerful moments in the films, we're not left with a lot in its wake.  Despite the films generally working, there's nothing in the new characters that feels particularly interesting...Poe Dameron & Rey are cool characters, but they won't have the cultural cache that the originals did, and if they reboot the Star Wars films, them returning won't have the same impact that Han, Luke, & Leia returning will.  And the legacy characters are now dead forever unless you pull some soap opera magic...and we now have Han Solo dying at the hands of his ungrateful, spoiled-brat son, one of the great action heroes of all time going down in such a way is rough if you think about it for longer than five seconds.

Even for films that don't kill off their characters, these sequels come at a price.  One of the great unsolved questions of 1980's cinema was "is Deckard a replicant?" an elegant nerd question that a sequel would either have to answer (replicants shouldn't be able to age/live as long based on the rules of the original) or muddy the rules of the original.  They end up doing the latter, basically giving heretofore unmentioned loopholes in the replicant theory that end up keeping alive the question without actually answering it.  In a beautifully-shot sequel, it totally squanders a lot of fan love for me.  It's also another sequel where I just don't care about the new characters-I only spend my time with the legacy ones.

Which brings us back to Scream 5.  Dewey dying isn't the end of the Scream franchise, but no new character in the film remotely approaches him in terms of importance or personality.  Essentially, while we got a good movie (it's a thumbs up from me, particularly the thrilling final third), we lost one of the characters that makes the franchise special without much in return, and similar to Han Solo, we have a decades-beloved character going down to yet another copycat killer, dying mostly to raise the stakes for the audience but man is his life sad if you look at how it ended, essentially dying for nothing other than to carry forward the plot.  If the Scream franchise is dying, ending in the next movie, I might be fine with that...but it's not.  And we have to stop pretending that these massive franchises are Law & Order, where suddenly it's just as good even though you rebooted and replaced the original characters with lesser versions of themselves.  Legacy sequels (and we have a lot of them coming up-I am already having nightmares about how they're 100% going to kill off some combination of Sam Neill/Jeff Goldblum/Laura Dern in the next Jurassic World movie and destroy one of my favorite movies in the process) are here to stay...can't they learn something from Mad Max: Fury Road enough to realize that if the new characters don't justify the old ones, you don't need to touch the original?  Not all IP has to be milked to the point where you can't even love the original.