The Worst Movie Sequel Of All Time

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The Worst Movie Sequel Of All Time

© Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Hollywood executives have a working assumption regarding many movies. If the first installment of a film did extremely well, then a sequel would have a chance to do well, too. The argument makes some sense. The first movie builds a brand, and the moviegoing public is already familiar with the characters. What could go wrong?

Apparently, a lot can go wrong. Some movie sequels have bombed entirely. This can happen even when the same actors are used and the plot is an extension of the earlier one. There is no research about how this happens. If there were, producers might save hundreds of millions of dollars a year and some audiences would be sparred a disappointment.

To determine the worst movie sequel, 24/7 Tempo developed an index based on several measures from the Internet Movie Database and Rotten Tomatoes. The index is a composite of the movies’ IMDb rating, Rotten Tomatoes audience score, and Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score.

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Only films with at least 20,000 reviews on IMDb and 2,000 audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes were considered. Data was collected mid-March 2021. Supplemental data on domestic box office and production budgets by movie came from industry data site the Numbers.

The worst movie sequel of all time is “Speed 2: Cruise Control,” released in 1997. Here are some details:

> Starring: Sandra Bullock, Jason Patric, Willem Dafoe
> Directed by: Jan de Bont
> Worldwide box office (adjusted to inflation): $300.2 million

Boasting the acting talent of Keanu Reeves, Dennis Hopper, and Sandra Bullock, “Speed” (1995) has an exceptional 94% Freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Bullock is the only one who returned for the sequel flop, “Speed 2: Cruise Control” (1997), which was liked by only 4% of critics. The movie replaces the original’s speeding bus with a cruise ship that is similarly forced to maintain a high speed.

Click here to read the 25 Worst Movie Sequels of All Time

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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