2024 film sequels, ranked: Have been any of them essential?

In Hollywood, the query “Does this film franchise want one other chapter?” appears to have a fairly simple reply: “Positive, if we predict it’ll nonetheless generate profits!”

For followers of a given franchise, although, the calculations are extra sophisticated. Will that new installment in a film sequence truly add something worthwhile to the story, or simply undermine the franchise’s authentic successes? Can we truly wish to know extra about our favourite characters, or will prequels and spinoffs damage them? Do we now have any purpose to imagine the most recent film utilizing a well-known IP has a purpose to exist that isn’t totally mercenary? Will it not less than be some massive dumb enjoyable?

Whereas loads of 2024’s would-be IP blockbusters have shifted to 2025 dates, the 12 months to date has nonetheless seen its share of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs. So we’re working the numbers, rating the 12 months’s latest-in-a-series motion pictures by how properly they justify their existence — each as motion pictures, and as installments in ongoing tales.

A remake of 2008’s home-invasion horror film The Strangers wasn’t essential, but it surely may have been good: With a premise as strong gold as “masked strangers break right into a distant house and kill the couple vacationing there,” there are one million completely different takes that would have been nice horror fodder that doesn’t comply with the unique film beat for beat. Sadly, that’s precisely the uninspired strategy director Renny Harlin (Die Laborious 2) takes with this film, the primary in a deliberate trilogy that was initially written as one large four-hour-plus film, till Legendary Leisure broke it down into chunks.

This new batch of Strangers motion pictures is supposed to comply with the characters within the aftermath of this preliminary house invasion. However it kicks off with Harlin basically remaking the primary Strangers with much less type and dread. Gone is the sluggish creepiness of the unique film, changed by rushed horror sequences and some moments of lackluster motion. Whereas it’s attainable that components 2 and three someway redeem the kickoff, Chapter 1 is nothing greater than a considerably worse retread of an efficient shocker. —Austen Goslin

Madame Net is solely loosely linked to Sony’s already loosely linked universe of Marvel characters. Ironic, on condition that the tagline “Her net connects all of them” was the central focus of all of the teasers. The one factor this gives to longtime followers of the present live-action Spider-Man narrative is a tease about Peter Parker’s existence — one thing that’s at all times been an enormous query mark within the Sony Marvel motion pictures. Paramedic Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson) is associates with Peter’s (sizzling, younger, not but lifeless in a morally instructive approach) Uncle Ben, in spite of everything! Besides the movie by no means truly acknowledges that Ben’s new child nephew is Peter Parker, to the purpose the place holding again on that element turns into one thing like a bit. It’s nearly pandering, however not indulgent sufficient to really feel fulfilling in any respect.

With its stilted dialogue and nonsensical plot, Madame Net just isn’t an excellent film in any respect. No less than it’s the form of horrible film that’s enjoyable to look at in a bunch setting, whereas making jokes and tuning out the slower bits? It’s roughly Cats for superhero followers. —Petrana Radulovic

This sequel to a sequelish reboot brings the brand new era of Ghostbusters (Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, and so on.) again to New York, and brings again the unique characters (Invoice Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, and so on.) for greater than a glorified cameo. That is perhaps sufficient to make it important for superfans, however for everybody else, it’s a nostalgic callback to the unique film with not a lot new or participating to make it stand out, other than Grace’s character’s maybe-queer storyline with a cute ghost lady. —PR

Nobody within the Despicable Me motion pictures appears to age. Former supervillain Gru (Steve Carell) seems similar to he did within the first film, and so do his daughters, who’ve been kids for 14 years now. And but someway, Gru and his spouse Lucy (Kristen Wiig) pursued a relationship, received married, and had a child. So not less than there’s some sense of time passing, even when it looks as if Gru Jr. is perhaps an toddler for the subsequent decade of sequels.

Despicable Me 4 contributes just a few enjoyable new world-building components to the franchise, although it sadly doesn’t discover them sufficient to make them vital. Nonetheless, a few of them may set the stage for future adventures. (A complete college for villains?) This installment additionally provides a small however completely hilarious element to Gru’s previous, a backstory involving a highschool expertise present and the track “Karma Chameleon.” Nothing about Despicable Me 4 is important, but it surely’s cool to see just a few extra funky particulars about this broadly outlined world. —PR

The fourth entry within the sequence Michael Bay inadvertently kicked off along with his directorial debut Unhealthy Boys again in 1995 brings again a whole lot of forged members — mainly the Unhealthy Boys themselves, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. However the filmmakers clearly assume Unhealthy Boys followers need much more continuity than that. Screenwriters Chris Bremner and Will Beall do their finest to construct a Quick & Livid-style Unhealthy Boys universe out of each little bit of character work and villain lore they will scrap collectively from the earlier three motion pictures.

That isn’t a praise. The place so many blockbuster motion pictures endure as a result of the studio is attempting to launch a worthwhile franchise as an alternative of telling a good story, Experience or Die assumes viewers are coming to the theater armed with nostalgia and a detail-oriented fascination with lore, reasonably than simply desirous to see a few gifted comedic actors mouth off at one another between frenetic motion sequences. Followers who care deeply in regards to the posthumous legacy of Joe Pantoliano’s character, that is your film. However principally, the franchise-building will get in the best way of the enjoyable. —TR

Fede Álvarez’s 2024 installment within the Alien franchise is sort of perversely outlined by how a lot it copies from previous Alien motion pictures, and the way little it provides to the canon: Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues can’t even conjure up their very own catchphrase, and fall again on having a brand new character echo the sequence’ most well-known line.

The movie is successfully creepy as a stand-alone, and for viewers who’ve by no means seen an Alien film, this would possibly all be new, thrilling horror fare. However it’d nonetheless come throughout as a bit underexplained, since this movie is aimed straight at individuals who know the franchise ahead and backward. It’s a greatest-hits montage, roughly: Bear in mind how creepy Xenomorphs are in water? Let’s try this once more. Chestbursters, facehuggers, Giger-esque genital imagery, evil androids suborning ships for the corporate — that was cool! Extra of that! And so forth. It’s an excellent time on the motion pictures, but it surely may hardly be much less important. —TR

The fourth within the new-era Planet of the Apes motion pictures (and the tenth Apes film if you happen to batch all of them collectively) doesn’t add a lot to the franchise’s ongoing narrative — it jumps the story ahead in time about 300 years for a narrative that’s frustratingly half-baked and surprisingly acquainted from the earlier entry, Warfare for the Planet of the Apes, however with a gorilla dictator working a compelled work camp as an alternative of a human one. There are some highly effective concepts at work — that historical past repeats itself, that communities are stronger than people, and that these communities have to band collectively to withstand tyrants — however they aren’t communicated significantly clearly, particularly since they’re combined in with different threads, about a private journey undercut by each Kingdom advert, and in regards to the unreliability and unknowability of humanity.

Kingdom is pleasurable sufficient within the second, an motion blockbuster with spectacular visible results and a few interesting characters. It isn’t a nasty or boring entry within the sequence. It simply by no means feels important, or prefer it’s doing a lot in addition to echoing extra propulsive, dynamic earlier entries on this run on the Apes story. —TR

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire feels just like the film the place the brand new MonsterVerse franchise hit its stride. Whereas 2014’s Godzilla calmly parodies catastrophe motion pictures and 2017’s Kong: Cranium Island does the identical for darkish conflict motion pictures, Godzilla x Kong is a buddy film a few large ape and a nuclear lizard who don’t like one another a lot, however are sometimes compelled to workforce as much as combat larger monsters. It’s inescapably dumb and uncomplicatedly entertaining.

However what makes this franchise particularly enjoyable proper now’s that it has a secret weapon: tv. Whereas the large display screen is reserved for foolish monster brawls, the MonsterVerse’s TV present, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, is a way more reserved, character-focused household drama that seems like an old-school journey film with large monsters thrown in. It’s a wonderful counterbalance to the foolish enjoyable of films like A New Empire, with the added bonus that the film’s story doubtless means Kong will probably be within the present’s subsequent season. The MonsterVerse is an odd franchise, however so long as each entry retains proving itself entertaining, it’s awfully exhausting to complain. —AG

The adventures of panda kung fu grasp Po (Jack Black) may’ve been wrapped up within the sequence’ third installment again in 2016, however Kung Fu Panda 4 provides a little bit of a postscript. The door is now open for an additional unlikely hero to take over the franchise, ought to DreamWorks resolve to go that route: Mainly, Po will finally retire from his title because the Dragon Warrior, and a protégé will take up the mantle. (That positively isn’t the way it labored within the first film, however I digress.) His inheritor obvious, the sneaky, thieving fox Zhen (Awkwafina), is definitely a fairly cool character. I wouldn’t be too mad seeing extra of her!

For the fourth film in an animated sequence, Kung Fu Panda 4 is decently pleasurable, principally affected by wasted potential. However the combat scenes are nonetheless cool, and the humor is humorous sufficient, even when it by no means reaches the highs of the originals. —PR

The First Omen is a sophisticated addition to this checklist. On the one hand, it isn’t essential, actually. And its worst moments come on the shut of the film, when the implied connections to the unique movie sequence are made much more specific than they already have been. The First Omen does, nonetheless, earn its place on this checklist through a completely completely different model of this metric: It’d simply be one of the best film within the Omen sequence, which makes it a necessity by default.

Even higher, by making a film this scary, director and co-writer Arkasha Stevenson (Model New Cherry Taste) truly retroactively improves the remainder of Damien’s story, simply by making his origins this disturbing. The First Omen is solely a wonderful horror film, and that’s greater than we will say for many franchise entries on this checklist, which is precisely why it clawed its approach close to the highest. —AG

Netflix’s animated Ultraman film isn’t following a strict franchise continuity like so lots of the sequels, prequels, and spinoffs on this rating. As an alternative, it’s a part of a sprawling historical past of anime, manga, comics, books, live-action motion pictures and reveals, and way more, lots of which reinvent the tokusatsu hero in radically other ways. This explicit installment additionally focuses way more on repackaging Ultraman for a brand new era than on tapping into or increasing his current lore. On this case, its worth to the franchise isn’t additive, it’s introductory: This can be a effective, accessible place for brand new and youthful viewers to step into the story, particularly in the event that they occur to be followers of inventive, dynamic animation. Longtime Ultraman followers received’t be taught something radically new right here, however they’ll get an ideal launch level for the subsequent era of followers. —TR

Pixar’s sequel to 2015’s Inside Out is the definition of a sequel increasing on a earlier film, generally to a fault. The primary film goes inside the top of 11-year-old Riley to discover how her personified feelings work together with one another; the sequel ages her as much as 13, introduces new emotion characters, and shoves her right into a sequence of latest, anxiety-related selections. In a whole lot of methods, this can be a more-of-the-same sequel, leaning on the same “essential characters misplaced at the back of Riley’s mind, different characters taking on at middle stage” plot, and loads of the identical corny-to-clever puns about how acquainted ideas, feelings, or associated constructions would possibly manifest as panorama options.

However the best way it recognizably tells a narrative about the identical central characters, whereas specializing in how profoundly time and the occasions of the final film modified them, is uncommon for an animated sequel. (We’re side-eying you proper now, eternally-suspended-in-time Despicable Me franchise.) Inside Out 2 forwards Riley’s evolution in significant methods, even when that does increase some larger questions in regards to the guidelines of this explicit world. —TR

You’d have to return just a few years to Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator franchise film Prey to discover a prequel that feels as important, participating, and significant to a movie sequence as A Quiet Place: Day One — and it’s notable that each motion pictures get to that time the identical approach. They each maintain continuity with the tales they’re organising, however neither one is attempting to dole out pointless sequence lore, or clarify issues that by no means wanted explaining: They’re each simply telling riveting motion tales in a longtime setting, and shifting focus to fully completely different characters with their very own distinctive dynamics.

Most catastrophe motion pictures on this vein (whether or not they’re alien-invasion-focused or not) middle on survivors. Author-director ​​Michael Sarnoski tunes in on somebody who doesn’t have survival as an choice: Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) is within the final weeks of a deadly sickness, and when killer aliens begin raining from the skies and chumming New York Metropolis and anybody in it who makes a noise, it’s barely shifting up the schedule on her mortality. Sarnoski offers her a perversely meaningless aim — to get throughout city to her favourite pizza place and revel in a ultimate slice earlier than she dies — after which spends half the film on taut, tense alien-stalking scenes, and the remaining on exploring why she’s so doggedly decided to do that one last item earlier than she goes. The give attention to her mixture of fatalism and obsession makes Day One an indelible story that expands the Quiet Place franchise in the easiest way attainable, with out piling on a bunch of additional, pointless world-building. —TR

Deadpool’s third live-action journey, and his first beneath the Disney-Marvel Studios banner, definitely earns excessive rankings for reputation: It has damaged information on its strategy to the highest of the field workplace. However extra considerably for the needs of this explicit rating, it pushes Deadpool’s story ahead, to the extent that something actually means something in a Deadpool film. Loss of life definitely doesn’t. It’s attainable that MCU canon does. Narrative rigor and character continuity don’t — however who goes to a Deadpool film for these?

The snark is tamer and fewer transgressive this day trip, however the Deadpool & Wolverine film continues to be formidable about increasing the character’s attain into new arenas, from bringing in the Loki sequence’ Time Variance Authority as villains to letting him beg for a shot at becoming a member of the Avengers. You may actually really feel producer-star Ryan Reynolds, his co-writers, and director Shawn Levy leveraging the Deadpool franchise’s reputation to get their palms on any property they need, from gleefully defiling the tip of 2017’s Logan to lining up cameos designed expressly for in-the-know comics followers. They hop round Marvel film continuity, grabbing and dropping no matter they need like nerdy magpies, and the film is extra enjoyable for it. Most franchise filMMAkers may solely dream of this type of freedom and entry. Say what you need in regards to the current movie-multiverse growth — not less than one franchise is simply utilizing it to create an even bigger, extra colourful sandbox. —TR

Furiosa is the uncommon prequel that feels not simply equal to the hit film it’s organising, however prefer it provides important context reasonably than gilding the lily. Conceived and written concurrently Max Max: Fury Street so it might be in step with that movie’s story and characterization, Furiosa doesn’t unnecessarily simply fill in how-did-this-character-get-here blanks, it tells its personal distinct story and solutions questions on who Fury Street’s most compelling new character is, and why she’s Max’s equal. Extra importantly, although, it’s wildly entertaining in its personal proper. —TR

The second half (or with luck, center third) of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation has a bonus no different film on this checklist has: It isn’t simply an adjunct to different motion pictures, it’s the important continuation of an opening-act film that was principally setup, constructing to this payoff.

Even leaving apart the compelling performances and visuals, the epic warfare, and the fascinating shift in perspective — which is to say, leaving apart the truth that it’s one in every of 2024’s finest motion pictures to date — Dune: Half Two would prime this checklist purely as a result of it’s an important a part of its franchise’s story. It doesn’t simply contribute new issues to a franchise, it’s a cornerstone of the story Villeneuve continues to be hoping he’ll get to inform extra of sometime. —TR