If parents love their first child and think the world does too, they have another, and then another … and sometimes even another … do those additional children run the risk of being labeled unoriginal or even disappointing? This may be what happens in the Hollywood box office, but I’m the youngest of three and it never happened to me.
When a movie is a huge box office success, take “Mission Impossible,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” or even “Jurassic Park” for example, it almost feels like a waste to not keep making more of the same.
After all, if a movie breaks box office records and rakes in millions of dollars, another movie just like it would do the same thing right?
Wrong.
In fact, there are several websites, like Box Office Mojo or The Numbers, that track box office numbers of movies and their companions.
According to the statistics on these sites, a myriad of film trilogies earned much more money on the first film, as opposed to the second or third, or sometimes even an embarrassing fourth. Movies like “Jurassic Park,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “The Hangover,” even “The Godfather” and “Back to the Future” follow this trend.
One exception that I found was “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which seems to have worked in the opposite direction. This trilogy earned the least with the first movie, and the most with the final installment. Interestingly, this is the glaring exception to a pretty basic pattern, and it also happens to be a trilogy based on a three-book series.
The way I see it, when screenwriters grow desperate to come up with a new, creative spin to put on some stale first and second film, they come up short. On the other hand, when screenwriters have fresh material to work with for each film in the trilogy, they have room to breathe and they are able to make improvements with each film, making the last film the best.
It might not be the best time in the world to quote Worldwide News Ukraine, but Maria Ivanova wrote an article there on the subject in August, 2013. She argues that Hollywood simply “takes characters to the East, adds the same old pot and stirs,” when it comes to making sequels and threequels.
She says that writers are simply using exotic locations to draw attention away from the fact that the storyline is not original or distinct from the first.
When stories are dependent on each other for completion, like the “The Lord of the Rings,” it is probably harder to disappoint the audience in terms of originality because viewers are following a storyline from the first film through the third.
As for me being a third child, I definitely don’t bring in more money than my siblings, and I don’t complete any major through-line of plot. On the other hand, I am not set in some exotic eastern location, and I am entirely original.
I think I would do okay in the box office – at least as good as “The Hobbit,” which takes the rule I outlined above about books and continuing storylines entirely out of context by stretching one short book into three major films to abuse the pocket books of viewers.