Screwy sequel titles

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I have a minor fascination with the titling of sequels, and my favorites are the weird ones. For example:

First Blood
Rambo: First Blood Part II
Rambo III
Rambo

The first two are fine, but Rambo III makes no sense because there was no Rambo II. It should be either Rambo II or First Blood Part III. (Or, even better, Rambo II: First Blood Part III.) And the fourth is great because there was already a movie titled Rambo.

Also:

The Fast and the Furious
2 Fast 2 Furious
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
Fast and Furious
Fast Five

I'm going to be disappointed if Part 6 doesn't have a screwy title, because there's a pattern here: the odd numbered films have decent titles but the even numbered ones are awful. 2 Fast 2 Furious redefines stupidity, and Fast and Furious just takes the first movie's title and removes the word "the."

Which brings us to:

Final Destination
Final Destination 2
Final Destination 3
The Final Destination
Final Destination 5

One of these titles is ridiculous. See if you can find it.

I hope that the next movie is called The Final Final Destination, and I hope they follow that with yet another sequel, because I like it when the title of a sequel promises that the series will be ending, but it turns out to be a lie. The Friday the 13th series did this twice: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was followed by Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, and Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday was followed by Jason X.

I also like it when a series can't decide between numbers and Roman numerals:

Death Wish
Death Wish II
Death Wish 3
Death Wish 4: The Crackdown
Death Wish V: The Face of Death

Sometimes I wish a sequel would be given the same title as its predecessor. If you're going to market Tron: Legacy by saying, "Tron, in theatres December 17," then why not just call it Tron? Nobody's going to confuse it with the first film. Japan trusts their audiences with this more than we do:

Godzilla (1954)
Godzilla (1984)

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)
Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1993)

These sequels were retitled Godzilla 1985 and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II when they were released in America. Luckily, not everyone here thinks we're morons: someone from the marketing department is trusting us to realize that the upcoming film The Thing is a prequel to The Thing from 1982.

Here's a current trend that needs to be shot in the head:

Carlito's Way: Rise to Power
The Dark Knight Rises
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Hannibal Rising
National Lampoon's Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

As much as I despise the Star Wars prequels, I think George Lucas actually deserves credit for not calling Episode III Rise of the Sith.

Didn't franchise titles used to be better? If these movies were remade today, I suspect that they would be titled Frankenstein, Frankenstein II, Frankenstein III, etc:

The Curse of Frankenstein
The Revenge of Frankenstein
The Evil of Frankenstein
Frankenstein Created Woman
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
The Horror of Frankenstein
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell

Phew. What's that they say about people with AS rambling too much?

You stole this bit from Angry Video Game Nerd.

I've never even visited that site before. There was, however, a similar topic on a website called All Movie Talk that I was a part of. If I stole it from anyone, I stole it from there.

Okay...to be fair, you both mentioned Rambo and Friday the 13th, but I think otherwise, you talked about different franchises. I'd have to watch the video again. Anyway, even if you're not a video game fan (I'm not really), I'd highly recommend AVGN. He's hilarious, and he talks about movies a lot too.

Can you give me a link? I've heard of AVGN before, but I don't even know if it's a website or YouTube guy or what.

By the way, here's the article I "stole" this from. I say "stole" because everything I "stole" was written by myself in the comment section.

http://www.allmovietalk.com/?p=55

Guillermo del Toro also needs to be given a little credit
for not calling Hellboy II: The Golden Army as...

Hellboy II: Rise of the Golden Army


I wouldn't be surprised if Part 6 {if there will be one}
of The Fast and the Furious franchise is called...


Fast Times Six

More Fast and Furious

Faster and More Furious

It's kind of sad that I'm getting more entertainment out of predicting the title than I've gotten from actually watching these mediocre movies. Although to be fair, I haven't seen Fast Five and I've been told that it's an improvement over the others.

I have no idea where they’ll go. Fast Fury? That’s the problem with sequel titles today, they always feel the need to include (at least partially) the original title in it. They didn’t trust people to be smart enough to realize that The Lost World was a sequel to Jurassic Park, so they titled it The Lost World: Jurassic Park. I think they should dump the “fast” and “furious” parts. It’s not like anyone is going to be confused about what it is.

Also: The Chronicles of Riddick. It's the title of one movie, but they decided that it should also be the overall series name, going so far as to retitle the Pitch Black DVD The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black. They also retitled the Raiders of the Lost Ark DVD to Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Because people are just too goddamned stupid to make the connection themselves, right?

Not exactly screwy, but what do you guys think of the titling of the Star Trek movies, particularly with regard to them dropping the sequel numbers as of the first TNG movie, 'Generations'? Also, TNG started a trend of shorter, one-word titles (First Contact being the exception, but then we have Insurrection and Nemesis), while the TOS movies had poetic titles like 'The Voyage Home' and 'The Final Frontier'.

Dropping the numbers after a few installments seems to be the norm. I’m actually surprised these days when I see ads for movies like Saw VI or Final Destination 5, and I’m relieved when a sequel is given a title like Live Free or Die Hard instead of Die Hard 4.

I agree about the older subtitles being better. The Undiscovered Country just sounds cool, a lot better than Insurrection or Nemesis.

One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of franchise movies these days are advertised using only the franchise titles. The announcer in the commercials for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest just said, “Pirates, July 7th!” and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal was just “Indiana Jones.” The subtitles in the logos are so tiny that you can tell how irrelevant they are. It’s no wonder to me that the last Trek movie was simply called Star Trek, because that’s how it would have been advertised anyway.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1SjvGwsEd0&feature=related[/youtube]

I would see a sequel to Cliffhander titled Cliff Hanger.

The dumbest sequel title I've seen was Hellraiser: Deader. Deader? How can you get deader? I spared myself the pain of watching the movie; seeing that stupid title on the DVD box was bad enough.

That is AVGN, but I was actually referring to this bit:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEVzPCY2T-g[/youtube]

Funny. He came up with the same thing I did for Rambo III.

If he finds the Final Fantasy II thing confusing, I wonder what he thinks of Final Fantasy X-2. That would be Final Fantasy Ten Two.

I also like it when a series is totally out of order chronologically. This happens more often with video games than movies. For example:

Metal Gear Solid 3
Metal Gear
Metal Gear 2
Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid 2
Metal Gear Solid 4

And there’s Quake 4, which is a sequel to... Quake II.

The part about the Bruce Lee movies was hilarious, but after looking up other sources, it appears as though the US got the alternate, US-market titles for the films Big Boss and Fist Of Fury mixed up. Apparently, Fist Of Fury was originally going to be FistS of Fury, while The Big Boss was to be retitled as The Chinese Connection, which was a play on the title of another movie.

"First Blood" is a strange title since it doesn't even have the word Rambo in it. Also, the fourth film might have simply been called "Rambo" cause it was made 20 years after the last one, and it was originally going to be called "John Rambo" which would have been pretty lame sounding. It will also probably be the last film in the series unless a prequel is made at some point.