league of extraordinary gentlemen Tagged Articles at Cinematical

There aren't too many movies that necessitate sequels. Unless a movie is part of a pre-proposed series or is an adaptation of a series of books, it should probably be able to stand alone. But a lot of sequels come from movies that are perfect by themselves -- sometimes the sequels compliment nicely; sometimes they are easily ignored; occasionally they actually take away from the previously regarded original.

It isn't often that a movie screams out for a sequel, but I think I've come up with seven that at least whisper a request for one. Two actually have source sequels that they would be adapted from. One has a lot of history to mine material from. Three of them have been discussed at length at different points in time by makers of the original(s). The problem is that none of these sequels is likely to ever grace your DVD player let alone your local theater. For whatever reason, they simply have too much against them in the minds of studio execs. For now, though, we can dream.

1. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Even with the incredible cast and the surprisingly faithful-enough script, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was not the epic that I was hoping for. It also wasn't the blockbuster that Disney was hoping for. The filmmakers, Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith (aka Hammer and Tongs) and the necessary actors had signed on for the sequel, to be adapted from Adam's follow-up, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, but it appears to be dead in the water. Despite my few reservations with the first film, I would love to see the sequel, as well as the rest of the series (they could end before The Salmon of Doubt, I guess). I remember being bored with some of the prehistoric Earth sequences in Restaurant, but I think they'd make for great cinema. In any event, I think Martin Freeman and Mos Def were a great duo in the original, and they alone should have been propelled to stardom following its release. Maybe they can appear in something else together.

Todd Field's adaptation of the novel Little Children by Tom Perrotta posed a lot of problems as he tried to cram the entire novel into a feature film ... so he rewrote it, literally. He hated the ending, and made some major changes, collaborating with Perrotta, who also shares a screenwriting credit on the film. They both worked together to make significant changes in order to adapt the book for into a film.

This isn't the first adaptation for either. Field wrote and directed Oscar-nominated In The Bedroom , which was based on an Andre Dubus short story. However, Dubus died two years before the film came out, which made it impossible for Field to colloborate with him. Perrotta's novel Election was adapted into a movie written by director Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor. Perrotta didn't work on that script, however, since it was the first one of his novels to be optioned, and the movie development went into high gear and was in theaters only a few months after the book came out.

When some studio announced its intent to turn Red Sonja into a film again, I got to thinking. We all know Red Sonja has been a film before, but the likelihood is of course very high the studio will ignore this previous (and very failed) attempt and start all over again, rather than pulling a direct sequel 20 years later. Everyone involved, especially the fans, are happy with this idea. We have no problem ignoring the first incarnation of the story on film and treating the new version as a stand alone -- something akin to a restart of the story. And this concept is not at all unusual to comic book movie fans who've survived some pretty crappy attempts through the years and patiently waited for the current age of the comic book movie.