Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticFor 45 years, Hollywood has churned out sequels to more or less any movie that makes a big enough splash at the box office.
The rationale has always been simple: The fans want it. Starting in the mid-’70s, with “Jaws” and “Rocky” and “Star Wars,” fan service became the model, the engine, the economic blueprint of the movie business.
Yet it was a double-edged sword.The idea that the fans who made a movie into a blockbuster would line up, once again, for a movie with a roman numeral after its title that was essentially the same movie, but just different enough to count as the new-and-improved version, turned out to be a spectacularly successful strategy.
Read more on variety.com