It's hard to please audiences when writing a movie sequel. danreilly11 and fauxbeatpoet spoke with 11 screenwriters who’ve worked across multiple sequel genres about their toughest franchise gigs
Photo: Zade Rosenthal/Warner Bros/Dc Comics/Kobal/Shutterstock There are two types of sequel writers: those who’ve earned the opportunity to build on their previous work and those who are hired to take existing characters or worlds and do something new with them. While no two sequel jobs are the same, all are filled with myriad pressures and expectations from fans who want to relive their experience with the first movie and studios who want a financial, if not critical, repeat of their hit.
I wasn’t even given directives by Tim Burton — just that he didn’t want Batman Returns to have anything to do with the first Batman. To be honest, I’m not a fan of Tim Burton’s first Batman. We didn’t have any loyalty to past histories of the Catwoman or Penguin character either. We did absolutely our own thing. In my first draft, Danny DeVito’s complaint about Penguin was, “This is too much like a Danny DeVito character.
What was doubly challenging on that film was that Bruce was also a producer and had so much invested in the character. It was very hard to speak with authority to him about what I thought was best for the story.
You’re always, in the back of your mind, thinking about the fans. With Star Trek, you realize there’s just no satisfying everybody. The movie did really well. It was No. 1 at the box office when it opened. It got some positive reviews, it got some negative reviews, it received some valid criticisms. We took the lessons we learned from that to make a better sequel, First Contact, with a better villain, higher stakes, and just a higher concept.
I was in the middle of writing the script, and we had this kind of lame “car breaks down” sequence. We couldn’t get excited about it. I flew up to Vancouver, where Channing was at the time. I was just like, “It all feels too generic. What were these things like? What happened to you when you went to these stripper conventions?” He was like, “Dude, it was dumb.
My heart sinks at the 70-minute mark of the movie, when Mark’s character has Desiree’s character out in the woods. It’s a much darker, more sinister moment than the death in the first movie, and part of it is because you’ve sort of been charmed by this person. That was a decision made out of instinct.
The very first audience that saw it wasn’t quite sure how to react, but they ultimately found the movie funny. Then gradually the word of mouth that the movie was funny spread and everyone knew what to expect from the scene when they saw it and responded accordingly.Joe Berlinger, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 Photo: Artisan Entertainment I should have known something was amiss by how I actually came to be the director of this movie.
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