Every Wednesday, The Picture Show’s Philip Molloy is live in studio with George Hook, taking a look at what’s splashing across the silver and small screen this week. Tune in live at 6.30pm or listen back to the podcasts here.
On this evening’s show, Philip will once again take a look at the classic dystopian action flick Mad Max, ahead of the release of the reboot next week starring Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron. A huge fan of the franchise, Philip will tell listeners how Dublin’s arthouse cinema The Lighthouse is screening the first two movies in the Mel Gibson canon this Saturday night. No such luck for 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome. Perhaps Tina Turner was on to something when she belted out We Don’t Need Another Hero.
The ‘threequel’, the buzzword usually attributed to the third part of a franchise, and have proven to be a contentious and interesting part of modern cinema. A lot rarer than the sequel, a third part is only usually awarded to the most financially fruitful film series and superhero juggernauts.
While a few critical darlings and audience favourites have raised the profile of the threequel, with Toy Story 3 so well received it was nominated for the ‘Best Picture’ top gong at the 2011 Oscars, three is rarely a magic number when it comes to the movies. So derided are the third parts of the franchise, that almost every release of a threequel will be met with some blogging op-ed asking whether this time round with crack the curse.
It’s the bottom-line that sees these bottom-scraping films get studio approval, and the huge box-office returns breathe life into them every year. But despite bringing in millions, a poorly-judged third film can wreck a franchise and leave fans disillusioned with the whole sorry affair. Here are the top five threequels we could have done without:
Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon
As one of the top grossing films of all time, the sad reality of Michael Bay’s third Transformers flick is that it might actually be better than the sequel preceding it. At 154-minutes long, it’s an overblown piece of vapid CGI chewing gum, replacing Megan Fox with the even less interesting Rosie Huntington-Whitely. The legend goes that her first audition for the role saw Bay drive her into the middle of the desert, plonk her on the salt flats, drive half a mile away and ask her to walk towards him wearing only lingerie, high-heels, and a cape.
Alien 3
An infamous disaster that almost ended the career of David Fincher as a feature-film director before it had even taken off was a troubled shoot right from the first pages of the script. That the storyline, which sees Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley marooned on a prison planet, originally saw her fighting aliens in a wooden space station inhabited by monks, is strange enough. That that script was actually better is even more bizarre. The entire movie is just being brushed over in the new final instalment soon to go into production.
Spider-Man 3
A classic case of too many cooks spoiling what was up until that point the most critically adored superhero franchise on the big screen. The film completely undermines the careful plotting of the first two, completely throwing Mary-Jane (Kirsten Dunst) under the bus and turning her into a whiney failure. Add to the mix three separate villains and some funky space goo, along with a notoriously cringey scene in which Peter Parker’s bad-boy side is unleashed through the power of disco, and this threequel proved to be all the nails in the coffin on Sam Raimi’s version of the Marvel web-slinger. Still, at least he managed one more movie than the recent reboot, deemed so big a failure that Sony has licensed back the character to Marvel.
The Godfather Part III
Coming after a string of flops and 16 years after the preceding movies, The Godfather Part III was a movie that Francis Ford Coppola never intended to make. The first two films were the full and finished story of the Corleone crime dynasty, and there really weren’t any loose ends to tie up. But Paramount Pictures pestered Coppola to make a sequel, pressuring him for 15 years to take the helm on the project. When he finally did, the shoot was plagued by disasters, and Sofia Coppola, Francis’s daughter, became an industry punchline when cast as Mary – an experience she hated so much that she vowed to only ever work behind the camera, eventually becoming a highly respected auteur (autrice?) of American cinema.
Superman III
Christopher Reeve’s third outing as the man of steel came hot on the heels of the troubled shoot of the sequel which saw Richard Donner fired from the helm. The threequel is considered the lowest point in the franchise, with stand-up comedian Richard Pryor shoehorned in as a tech-whizz villain – who at one point skis away while wearing a pink cape and setting wind-up penguins on Superman. Dodgy special effects, a plot riddled with holes, and the kind of baddies so poor that they’re unworthy to even kneel before Zod make this one of the worst threequels of all time.
