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

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

For followers of a given franchise, although, the calculations are extra sophisticated. Will that new installment in a film collection 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 wreck them? Do we now have any motive to imagine the newest film utilizing a well-recognized IP has a motive to exist that isn’t fully mercenary? Will it not less than be some huge dumb enjoyable?

Whereas loads of 2024’s would-be IP blockbusters have shifted to 2025 dates, the 12 months thus far 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 films by how nicely they justify their existence — each as films, and as installments in ongoing tales.

A remake of 2008’s home-invasion horror film The Strangers wasn’t obligatory, however it might have been good: With a premise as stable gold as “masked strangers break right into a distant dwelling and kill the couple vacationing there,” there are 1,000,000 totally 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 films is supposed to comply with the characters within the aftermath of this preliminary dwelling invasion. But it surely kicks off with Harlin primarily remaking the primary Strangers with much less type and dread. Gone is the gradual creepiness of the unique film, changed by rushed horror sequences and some moments of lackluster motion. Whereas it’s potential that elements 2 and three in some way redeem the kickoff, Chapter 1 is nothing greater than a considerably worse retread of an efficient shocker. —Austen Goslin

Madame Internet is barely loosely related to Sony’s already loosely related universe of Marvel characters. Ironic, provided that the tagline “Her net connects all of them” was the central focus of all of the teasers. The one factor this presents to longtime followers of the present live-action Spider-Man narrative is a tease about Peter Parker’s existence — one thing that’s all the time been a giant query mark within the Sony Marvel films. Paramedic Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson) is pals with Peter’s (scorching, younger, not but useless in a morally instructive method) 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 virtually pandering, however not indulgent sufficient to really feel fulfilling in any respect.

With its stilted dialogue and nonsensical plot, Madame Internet shouldn’t be a very good film in any respect. At the very least it’s the kind of horrible film that’s enjoyable to look at in a bunch setting, whereas making jokes and tuning out the slower bits? It’s kind of 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 forth.) again to New York, and brings again the unique characters (Invoice Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, and so forth.) for greater than a glorified cameo. That could be 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 woman. —PR

Nobody within the Despicable Me films appears to age. Former supervillain Gru (Steve Carell) seems to be identical to he did within the first film, and so do his daughters, who’ve been kids for 14 years now. And but in some way, 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 like Gru Jr. could be an toddler for the following decade of sequels.

Despicable Me 4 contributes a number of 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 might 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 tune “Karma Chameleon.” Nothing about Despicable Me 4 is crucial, however it’s cool to see a number of extra funky particulars about this broadly outlined world. —PR

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

That isn’t a praise. The place so many blockbuster films undergo as a result of the studio is attempting to launch a worthwhile franchise as an alternative of telling an honest story, Trip or Die assumes viewers are coming to the theater armed with nostalgia and a detail-oriented fascination with lore, slightly than simply eager 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 way in which of the enjoyable. —TR

Fede Álvarez’s 2024 installment within the Alien franchise is nearly perversely outlined by how a lot it copies from previous Alien films, 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 collection’ 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. But it surely’d nonetheless come throughout as a bit underexplained, since this movie is aimed immediately at individuals who know the franchise ahead and backward. It’s a greatest-hits montage, kind of: Bear in mind how creepy Xenomorphs are in water? Let’s do 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 a very good time on the films, however it might hardly be much less important. —TR

The fourth within the new-era Planet of the Apes films (and the tenth Apes film in case you 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, Struggle for the Planet of the Apes, however with a gorilla dictator working a pressured 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 must band collectively to withstand tyrants — however they aren’t communicated significantly clearly, particularly since they’re combined in with different threads, a couple of private journey undercut by each Kingdom advert, and in regards to the unreliability and unknowability of humanity.

Kingdom is pleasant sufficient within the second, an motion blockbuster with spectacular visible results and a few interesting characters. It isn’t a foul or boring entry within the collection. 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 evenly parodies catastrophe films and 2017’s Kong: Cranium Island does the identical for darkish warfare films, Godzilla x Kong is a buddy film a couple of large ape and a nuclear lizard who don’t like one another a lot, however are sometimes pressured to group as much as combat greater monsters. It’s inescapably dumb and uncomplicatedly entertaining.

However what makes this franchise particularly enjoyable proper now could be that it has a secret weapon: tv. Whereas the large display 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 superb counterbalance to the foolish enjoyable of films like A New Empire, with the added bonus that the film’s story seemingly means Kong can be within the present’s subsequent season. The MonsterVerse is a wierd franchise, however so long as each entry retains proving itself entertaining, it’s awfully onerous to complain. —AG

The adventures of panda kung fu grasp Po (Jack Black) might’ve been wrapped up within the collection’ 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 determine to go that route: Principally, 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 collection, Kung Fu Panda 4 is decently pleasant, 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 listing. On the one hand, it isn’t obligatory, actually. And its worst moments come on the shut of the film, when the implied connections to the unique movie collection are made much more specific than they already had been. The First Omen does, nonetheless, earn its place on this listing by way of a completely totally different model of this metric: It would simply be the perfect film within the Omen collection, 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 just a superb horror film, and that’s greater than we will say for many franchise entries on this listing, which is precisely why it clawed its method 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 films and reveals, and rather more, a lot of which reinvent the tokusatsu hero in radically other ways. This specific 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 fantastic, 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 study something radically new right here, however they’ll get an ideal launch level for the following 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 pinnacle 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 collection of latest, anxiety-related selections. In a number of methods, it is a more-of-the-same sequel, leaning on an analogous “necessary 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 buildings would possibly manifest as panorama options.

However the way in which 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 elevate some greater questions in regards to the guidelines of this specific world. —TR

You’d have to return a number of years to Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator franchise film Prey to discover a prequel that feels as important, participating, and significant to a movie collection as A Quiet Place: Day One — and it’s notable that each films get to that time the identical method. They each preserve continuity with the tales they’re establishing, however neither one is attempting to dole out pointless collection 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 utterly totally different characters with their very own distinctive dynamics.

Most catastrophe films 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 possibility: 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 provides her a perversely meaningless objective — to get throughout city to her favourite pizza place and luxuriate 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 very last thing earlier than she goes. The concentrate on her mixture of fatalism and obsession makes Day One an indelible story that expands the Quiet Place franchise in one of the simplest ways potential, 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, actually earns excessive rankings for recognition: It has damaged data on its approach to the highest of the field workplace. However extra considerably for the needs of this specific rating, it pushes Deadpool’s story ahead, to the extent that something actually means something in a Deadpool film. Dying actually doesn’t. It’s potential 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 out, however the Deadpool & Wolverine film remains to be formidable about increasing the character’s attain into new arenas, from bringing within the Loki collection’ Time Variance Authority as villains to letting him beg for a shot at becoming a member of the Avengers. You’ll be able to actually really feel producer-star Ryan Reynolds, his co-writers, and director Shawn Levy leveraging the Deadpool franchise’s recognition to get their fingers 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 might solely dream of this sort of freedom and entry. Say what you need in regards to the latest 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 establishing, however prefer it provides important context slightly than gilding the lily. Conceived and written concurrently Max Max: Fury Highway so it will be in line 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 Highway’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 listing has: It isn’t simply an adjunct to different films, 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 greatest films thus far — Dune: Half Two would high this listing 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 remains to be hoping he’ll get to inform extra of sometime. —TR