It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen – a film’s sequel is planned before the first is even released. Mostly this is a sign of extreme confidence on the part of a studio that a film will make a lot of lucre at the box office, sometimes it’s just due to a creator’s enthusiasm for the material, but it’s always newsworthy. Here are a few films that have been lucky enough to have this happen already.
Green Lantern
One of the big stories making the rounds today is that a writing team has been hired to pen a treatment for a Green Lantern sequel already, a year before the first film’s release. Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Green will work on the project.
Tron Legacy
Disney has an incredible amount of confidence in its rebooted Tron franchise, with theme park rides and television series already planned, as well as a sequel in mind. The film is due for release later this year, so we’ll see if the company’s confidence is well placed.
Avatar
Fox and its army of investors took a huge gamble on Avatar, but it paid dividends, and dividends, and dividends for them. It’s undoubtedly the case that they want a sequel, and when we spoke to director James Cameron last year, he said that he already has a trilogy mapped out.
Star Wars prequels
Such is the power of the Lucasfilm machine that there was never any doubt that we’d see the full prequel trilogy. Indeed, there wasn’t even one dissenting voice that proposed The Phantom Menace would tank, as it would be pure insanity to make such a prediction. Mediocrity followed.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Nimoy was asked to direct this comedic fourth outing for the Enterprise before The Search For Spock was even completed, such was the positive commercial reaction to the first Trek film and the good critical reception for the second.
