[Perry] Too-Similar Sequels

So recently, I finally managed to watch 22 Jump Street, sequel to the unexpectedly successful 21 Jump Street from two years and a half years ago.

If you haven’t seen them, 21 Jump Street is a reboot of an old tv show about cops going undercover at a high school.

21 Jump Street was an unexpectedly self-aware comedy that worked REALLY well. It looked a lot like it would just be an incredibly stupid movie, one of those low brow comedies? But it was anything but.

22 Jump Street followed in its steps. It basically took the same formula as the first movie, switched it around just a little so that a different character finds himself in the “cool” crowd, and just…lets them work.

And you know what? It works. It works REALLY well.

But here’s the thing that surprised me.

Back a while? I watched another sequel to a successful first movie.

The Boondock Saints 2. Have any of you ever seen that tripe?

Riding on the success of the first movie, the sequel took the exact same formula, almost shot for shot in some cases, and tried to use the exact same methods and techniques to tell a different story.

And it failed.

It failed HARD.

The general consensus was that it was trying too hard. It was trying too hard to evoke the success of the first movie and ended up following it with slavish devotion.

It felt tired. It felt like it was nothing new. It was trying so hard to do what the first movie did, that it started stepping right into its old footsteps with no variations.

Conversely…there’s 22 Jump Street.

Same as the previous example, 22 Jump Street does a lot of callbacks and references to the first movie. In this case, though? It doesn’t feel derivative. It feels playful and light-hearted. It feels like they made the movie so similarly intentionally. Like they’d planned to do it all along. Right down to the very end and the final lengthy gag about potential sequels to the franchise.

In one case, a very similar seeming sequel works out very well.

In the other case, a very similar seeming sequel flops around like a dying fish.

What I think? Is that it has to do with that self-referential humor and attitude.

Jump Street knew that it’d be making fun of itself going in. And a lot of the humor played off of that idea, first by flipping the personal trials of the characters around from the first movie, and then laying it on thick with the marginally fourth wall breaking humor.

Boondock Saints just…wanted to make the first movie again. Didn’t really differentiate enough from that first movie to feel like a sequel…more sort of like a cheap knockoff of itself. It ended up feeling like a washed out, pale imitation of itself.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this, to be honest. They were just thoughts kicking around in my head after I watched 22 Jump Street and started thinking about other very similar sequels and what made them work or not work.

If there’s a lesson to be had in all of this?

It’s this.

When it comes to writing sequels, DO keep the elements that made the original popular and famous.

DON’T play close enough to that line that it feels like tired, slavish copycat, instead of a homage to itself.

 

 

 

 

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