Movie fans are celebrating the age of the legacy sequel we’re living in, with the advent of films like Jurassic World Dominion and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, among others.
Twitter user @TheFirstOkiro put together an excellent collage including those aforementioned films with their respective legacy stars, as well as Mark Hamill from his cameo in The Mandalorian, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, and Hayden Christensen and Ewan McGregor in Obi-Wan Kenobi.
“The era of Legends returning,” the film fanatic wrote.
Another fan cited David Tennant’s return as Doctor Who in 2022 as more evidence of legendary returns.
However, somewhat unsurprisingly, not everyone agrees the age of perpetuating intellectual properties is a good thing, as Goodfellas director Martin Scorsese has notably lamented.
“The era of writers having no clue what they are gonna do with a big franchise and appealing to people’s nostalgia and childhood memories to make huge profits,” one cynic wrote.
A nostalgia defender had a nuanced retort, saying, “I think the way it’s been done is fresh and deferential.”
“These aren’t simply mimicking remakes of the originals, but showing the originals at a later stage of life within the story. They’ve changed, grown; and we’re happy they weren’t forgotten.”
By the way, now that Universal’s dismal “Dark Universe” franchise of monster movies has unambiguously failed, can we just go ahead and bring Brendan Fraser back in a legacy sequel to his classic Mummy movies of the 2000s? As much as we love Tom Cruise, the 2017 attempted reboot he starred in just doesn’t hold a candle to the cheesy action-adventure fun we got with Fraser’s version.
Another fan pointed out we’re thrillingly close to experiencing a reunion of the noxious on-screen chemistry of Bryan Cranston’s Walter White and Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman, from Breaking Bad, thanks to their soon-to-be appearance in the prequel show, Better Call Saul, as We Got This Covered previously reported.
With Jurassic World: Dominion currently dominating theaters, it looks like the “rebootquel,” as some have called the genre (see: RedLetterMedia), is here to stay.