The top ten most unnecessary sequels of all time

• Entertainment
• Top10

As we watch the gleaming wreckage of Cars 2, The Hangover: Part 2 (yeah, because the Part gives you extra legitimacy), Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Furious Five and innumerable other atrocities against the principle of narrative closure bust through our box offices, I thought it time to cast our eyes back across the rich and disaster filled history of unnecessary sequels.

10. Speed 2

No matter how you phrase it, there really just isn't anything particularly thrilling about a cruise liner.



9. Saw II-VII

I saw the first Saw. It was a novelty. A creepy, unsettling novelty with a terrifying puppet villian. But six goddamn sequels? That's almost putting it on par with Harry Potter, and Harry Potter this ain't. Anyway, by now I think we get the idea – get ordinary people in a room and make them do horrendous things to one another for 90 minutes in order to survive. Yay. Nobody's winning by this point, especially not the audience. Here's a blow by blow summary of the traps in the seventh film.



8. Titanic 2

I feel kind of cheaty including low budget monstrosities in this list, as, hey, there's always going to be some overly rich madman around to throw a few thousand dollars at a project, but this does strike me as a particularly heinous example of the genre. Winning lines from the preview

CAPTAIN: Let's go make history

[Some minutes later]

CAPTAIN: Looks like history is repeating itself.



7. Teen Wolf Too

PLUS: Gave Jason "Michael Bluth" Bateman a career.

MINUS: Teen Wolf Too.



6. Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties

Oh yes, because the first one of these definitely needed to be made.



5. Godfather III

Notable because Francis Ford Coppola went from producing the best sequel of all time to one of the worst. A classic of the genre. I think Pacino speaks for all of us here.



4. Grease 2

AKA The Childhood Killer



3. Star Wars 1: The Phantom Menace

This about sums it up.



2. Bridget Jones 2: The Edge of Reason

The thing is, I actually liked Bridget Jones 1. She was funny. She was sassy. She was deeply sympathetic. And then they decided to make a sequel, which, like so many sequels, appeared to have been written by professional fans of the character rather than anyone with a vested interest in the franchise, resulting in Bridget's transformation into a weak, simpering, desperate sack of boredom who had no character trait beyond "Got's to get me a husband". Here's the end of the infamous scene where Bridget goes to a Thai prison and wins over the ladies by giving them men vs women pop psychology books and underwear (although just misses them doing a dance routine to Madonna's 'Like a Virgin'. Particularly sensitive given how many of the women are likely in jail because of prostitution related charges. NBC seems to be on a mission to keep that one off the internet). It's in Spanish, but, remarkably, actually succeeds in making the film better.



1. Sex and the City 2

It's hard to believe that there has ever been a more malicious, malignant sequel than SATC2. Sexist, homophobic and racist beyond measure – in addition to being terribly written, shallow, bloated and unfunny – the film was so unnecessary that they had the main characters LEAVE THE GODDAMN CITY OF THE TITLE! It wasn't Sex and the City, it was Sex and the Kinda Scary Sand People Who We Later Discover Are Horrible, Shallow Harridans Just Like Us And Isn't That Nice? Tricked into seeing it by Paul Verhoeven, I walked out of the cinema and completely without equivocation used the line "That was the worst thing that I have ever been through. And I've had cancer. Twice".



- Luke Ryan