The bottom line with show business is that it is, after all, a business. Whether it's Broadway, Paramount, WWE, or Major League Baseball, the need to turn a profit precludes the need to produce an honest product. And when the executives in charge find a product that the huddled masses really like, they feel the need not only to make more of it, but to top the original.
And thus we encounter the problem of the Summer Blockbuster Sequel. Once every year or two, the motion picture studios produce a genuinely good summer movie. Think Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Iron Man, or Star Wars. People eat it up. I practically had an orgasm at the end of Iron Man. Movies like that are one of the things in life that keep me from going insane (and trust me, I'm actually closer to losing it than I already seem). But then, time after time, I have to sit and endure the pain of the Hollywood machine shitting all over the sequels to these perfectly good films.
Before anyone gets mad at me, let me just say that I liked Iron Man 2. I did. No, it wasn't as good as the first one, but I didn't expect it to be. I commend the makers of that movie for not totally succumbing to the typical Summer Blockbuster Sequel format. But there are a few symptoms of Hollywood poopdickery.
A good sequel takes the characters we got to know in the first movie, explores their relationships, puts them through struggles together, and slowly begins to peel through the layers of their personalities. There is a reason why The Empire Strikes Back is my all-time favorite movie. It does all of these things flawlessly. That moment when Leia says "I love you" and Han says "I know" actually DID give me an orgasm.
Summer Blockbuster Sequels DO NOT DO THIS. They take the characters from the first movie, oversimplify and exaggerate them, add three or four other underdeveloped primary characters, mix together three or four loosely related plotlines, and finish things off with gratuitous amounts of violence, sex, and CGI. The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is my favorite example of this. By the time we get to the last movie, we're confused before the opening credits even finish rolling. All I remember is that the plot (read plots) has something to do with Jack Sparrow, Captain Barbossa, Will Turner, Elizabeth Swann, Cutler Beckett, James Norrington, Davy Jones, Tia Dalma (read Calypso), Mr. Gibbs, those two annoying pirate guys, a kraken, and that Chinese slum lord. I think I forgot a few important people. Forgive me.
Iron Man 2 only does this a little bit. It introduces a few too many new characters. Personally, I would have been fine with just Scarlett Johansson. And by "just" I mean she would be naked. There's an awful lot of violence as well and we're asked to follow no less than 5 plots. Thankfully, they all at least make sense. Mostly. (My only real question is how Colonel Rhodes powered his suit without an arc reactor in his chest. Or why the Stark Industries Board of Directors didn't flip a shit when suddenly Tony's secretary became CEO. Or what Ivan Vanko would have done at that race if Tony hadn't made the last minute decision to drive a car. But this parenthetical is getting too long.)
My point, in short, is this: fuck bad sequels that are designed just to make money. I challenge Hollywood to make more stuff like The Empire Strikes Back and The Dark Knight. That way, all the asshole movie snobs like me can have more orgasms.
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