Sequel

Sequels are attractive to creators and publishers because there is less risk involved in returning to a story with known popularity rather than developing new and untested characters and settings.

Audiences are sometimes eager for more stories about popular characters or settings, making the production of sequels financially appealing.

Superman Returns (2006), Halloween (2018), Candyman (2021), Cobra Kai (2018-2025), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), the Star Wars sequel trilogy (2015-2019), Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), Tron: Legacy (2010), Top Gun: Maverick (2022), Doctor Sleep (2019), Rocky Balboa (2006), the Creed films (2015–present), Mary Poppins Returns (2018), The Matrix Resurrections (2021), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), Gladiator II (2024), and the Jurassic World trilogy (2015–2022) are examples of legacy sequels.

[13] Film journalist Pamela McClintock describes a requel as something that "exploits goodwill toward the past while launching a new generation of actors and stories".

A Shot in the Dark (1964), Big Top Pee-wee (1988), Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), Home Alone 3 (1997), The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), Species - The Awakening (2007), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011),[15] Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (2015), Wonder Woman 1984 (2020), Spirit Untamed (2021), Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021), Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022), Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024), Twisters (2024), and Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) are examples of standalone sequels.

[20] Strict legacy parallels are Kirill Eskov's novel The Last Ringbearer (1999) retelling the events of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1955) from the viewpoint of benevolent Mordorians combatting the malevolent West.

Likewise, Alice Randall's novel The Wind Done Gone (2001), contemporary to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), tells the life story of a mulatto woman born enslaved on the O'Hara plantation and The Lion King 1½ (2004), featuring the origins of characters Timon and Pumbaa occurring simultaneously within the original 1994 film.

Batman Begins (2005), Casino Royale (2006), Star Trek (2009), Børning (2014), Man of Steel (2013), and Terminator: Genisys (2015) are examples of reboot films.

Kathleen Loock has written that traditional reboots tended to stray away from depicting direct narrative or stylistic correlations to the previous versions of the franchise.

Contemporary reboots lean into the nostalgia factor and create new stories that simultaneously revel in the aspects of the original franchise that made it notable in the first place.

[28] The substantial shift toward a rapidly growing print culture and the rise of the market system by the early 18th-century meant that an author's merit and livelihood became increasingly linked to the number of copies of a work he or she could sell.

This shift from a text-based to an author-centered reading culture[29] led to the "professionalization" of the author – that is, the development of a "sense of identity based on a marketable skill and on supplying to a defined public a specialized service it was demanding.

With weak copyright laws and unscrupulous booksellers willing to sell whatever they could, in some cases the only way to prove ownership of a text was to produce another like it.

This became especially important in the economy of the 18th century novel, in which authors often maintained readership by drawing readers back with the promise of more of what they liked from the original.

Richardson was extremely vocal in his disapproval of the way the protagonist of his novel Pamela was repeatedly incorporated into unauthorized sequels featuring particularly lewd plots.

Instead, the recurring readership created by sequels let female writers function within the model of "familiar acquaintances reunited to enjoy the mutual pleasures of conversation", and made their writing an "activity within a private, non-economic sphere".

[30] Dissociated from the motives of profit and therefore unrestrained by the need for continuity felt by male writers, Schellenberg argues that female-authored sequel fiction tended to have a much broader scope.

[35] The cost of developing triple-A video games has increased significantly over recent years,[36][37][38] often reaching tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars due to high expectations for detailed graphics, expansive worlds, and advanced gameplay.

Building on an existing brand with an established fan base, sequels are perceived as safer investments than new intellectual properties (IP).

They allow companies to capitalize on previous successes, ensuring a built-in audience and reducing the financial risk associated with launching a new and unproven concept .

[40] In some cases, the characters or the settings of an original film or video game become so valuable that they develop into a series, lately referred to as a media franchise.

Examples of major media franchises include the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pokemon, Harry Potter, and Disney Princess.

[41] Movie sequels do not always do as well at the box office as the original, but they tend to do better than non-sequels, according to a study in the July 2008 issue of the Journal of Business Research.

[44] Some highly popular movies and television series have inspired the production of multiple novel sequels, sometimes rivaling or even dwarfing the volume of works in the original medium.