Hollywood makes a lot of sequels. After all, big budget movies are expensive and time-consuming, meaning that there is an understandable desire for movie studios to minimize their risk by following up on successful movies. However, it is interesting to note that there are also times when sequels aren’t recognized as sequels, which can happen for a wide range of reasons.
Here are five movies that people often don’t realize are sequels:
Army of Darkness
There is a surprising number of people who don’t realize that Army of Darkness was the third installment in the Evil Dead franchise. To be fair, it was a significant departure from its predecessors, seeing as how it featured the protagonist transported back in time to fight the forces of evil with a chainsaw hand. Something that would’ve come to a surprise to those who remembered the first movie with its standard setup of college students at a cabin being killed by a malevolent force one by one.
It Runs in the Family
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFIty4BJ_NM
It Runs in the Family is a sequel to A Christmas Story. In fact, both movies were centered around the Parker family, which was unsurprising when both movies were based on the same source material in the form of semi-autobiographical stories from the same person. However, so much time had passed between the filming of one movie and the other that most of the characters had to be recast, which explains why a lot of people didn’t realize the connection.
Shock Treatment
Since Shock Treatment was a failure from a critical as well as a commercial perspective, it tends not to receive the same amount of attention as its predecessor The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Regardless, the movie was still centered around Brad and Janet Majors, who have since become a married couple but end up meeting another eccentric cast of characters. Amusingly, characters who had carried over from The Rocky Horror Picture Show were recast, while actors who had carried over from the same movie were used to play new characters, which was a confusing mess caused by the movie-makers’ need to get creative in order to address the reluctance of the cast members to commit to the project.
The Color of Money
The Color of Money was based on the novel of the same name, so it should come as no surprise to learn that it was a sequel to The Hustler, which was also based on the novel of the same name. Both movies focused on a pool player played by Paul Newman, but since the second movie happened more than two decades after the first within the movie as well as in real life, the connection between them was not as obvious as it might have been under other circumstances.
The Silence of the Lambs
Released in 1991, The Silence of the Lambs was so successful that it spawned a sequel, two prequels, and even a TV show. However, most people aren’t aware that it wasn’t the first Thomas Harris novel to be adapted for the movie screen, seeing as how it had been preceded by Manhunter in 1986, which never managed to achieve more than cult movie status. In fact, the novel that Manhunter was based on became the basis for one of the two prequels that followed The Silence of the Lambs.
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