10 Sequels to Movies Where The Original Cast Was Killed

This week, Sparta lives again with 300: Rise of an Empire. But how does it make sense that there’s a sequel? Didn’t Leonidas and company bite the dust at the end of the first one?

This isn’t the first time a sequel has been made from a film where the main characters died. While Rise of an Empire presents a series of battles occurring during Xerxes’ siege on Leonidas’ 300, this approach alone isn’t the only way to revisit old stomping grounds where your favorite characters have died. Here are ten sequels that basically ignore everyone dying at the end of the first film.

There be spoilers ahead.

Return Of The Living Dead Part 2 (1988)

At the end of Return Of The Living Dead, itself loosely based on Night Of The Living Dead, the town is nuked and the Trioxin spill theoretically contained, leading us to assume that we won’t be meeting anyone from the first film; pleasantly, the filmmakers suggest that the leads are related to a wise and bumbling morgue attendant played by Clu Gulager. The sequels lack any real connective tissue until part five, and fans of the first film were likely pretty confused.

Evil Dead 2 (1987)

Ah, the completely nonsensical approach. At the end of the first film, Ash (Bruce Campbell) frees himself from the cabin, but the evil omnipotent Force attacks him, and we’re led to believe that’s the last we’ve seen of him. A supersized sequel, however, basically re-did the ending of the first film and rewrote around that final attack, keeping Ash alive for future installments. But if you went back to the ‘80s to watch this incredible movie with fans, it’s likely you’d be vexed by how Ash is still walking around.

Predator 2 (1990)

 Arnold, Carl Weathers, Sonny Landham, Jesse Ventura, Bill Duke… you just can’t recreate that collection of badasses, especially with Arnold surviving to do one-on-one battle with the beast, only one of them walking away victorious. Of course, this is an alien race that we don’t recognize, and you’d forgive people for watching the first film and thinking, this guy is the only one of his kind. Predator 2 ups the ante by hinting there’s more than one out there watching us lowly humans. But it also tries to replace Arnold with Danny Glover and company, and that’s not gonna work well with anyone.

[related article: 300: Rise of an Empire Review]

Hostel Part 2  (2007)

At the end of the first picture, Paxton (Jay Hernandez) is the only innocent survivor from the film to attempt to get away. But you never feel comfortable about where he’s going, so at the start of the second film, Eli Roth will not let Paxton get far, summarily dispatching of him in gruesome details like a hair has just been plucked. The rest of the story couldn’t be further from the odyssey in the original.

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

Audiences jumped from their seats with the dark ending of I Know What You Did Last Summer when the killer reached out and slaughtered our heroine Julie Jones (Jennifer Love Hewitt) in crashing suddenness. But the sequel attempts one of the cheapest strategies known to man: the end of that first movie was a dream. Ugh.

Demons 2 (1986)

The hook of Demons, a zombie thriller made perversely good by a rockin’ soundtrack, is that they’re all facing the undead while inside a movie theater. That one saw its characters not even as winners, but as knee-jerk goofballs. But in the sequel, the demons wage war against people in a high rise, destroying parties and attacking on all terrain. The movie treats the events of the first film as a terrible isolated incident, requiring that we not think too hard about continuity.

Blair Witch: Book Of Shadows (2000)

A similar approach took hold here, particularly because that first film was based on the idea of the actors lost and murdered in the forest, never to be found again. The second film, however, takes place in our world, surmising that the occurrences in the first movie were just a movie. It’s a nice dodge for a not-great movie, a way to avoid criticisms that they’re just doing the same thing again.

Alien: Resurrection (1997)

At the end of Alien 3, it seems like it’s all over: Ripley is the last of any actual characters in the first two films, and she flings herself into industrial lava to eliminate the alien brood inside her. Science has ways of bringing people back, but this seemed like a defiant way to end this series. But the fourth film solves this problem by cloning the character in the distant future, tossing her into a mess with characters similar to her shipmates in earlier films. Ripley might have been a different woman, but the spirit of the original films remained (at least cosmetically), even if the fourth picture was the fans’ least-liked.

Crank: High Voltage (2009)

The first Crank ends with Chev Chelios’ body flying towards the earth out of a helicopter, where his body lands ungracefully, smacking onto the concrete. The brief moment where he blinks is just a tease: Crank feels like a cartoon, but when people die, they’re gone, and Chelios could never survive a fall that far. Sure enough, the second movie begins by fudging the logistics there, implying that we haven’t seen anything quite yet from the unkillable hero.

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes (1971)

 The undisputed king of this trend, this Apes film had the distinction of following Beneath The Planet Of The Apes, which is quite a doozy for any franchise: at the end of the previous movie, Earth is nuked, and all the characters from the first two films are dead. But wait! This one retcons earlier pictures by seeing Cornelius, Dr. Milo, and Dr. Zira create a space ship out of the broken scraps from the first movie and traversing a black hole in Earth’s absence, visiting a time when the ape was still a slave.

Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all news updates related to the world of geek. And Google+, if that's your thing!