“Blade Runner 2049” did not make vulture's list of the 101 best movie sequels of all time. Let us explain, and give you a glimpse into the debates that occurred over two months of arguing about sequels
What a five-year-old movie can tell us about the future of franchises and whether films are moving backward. Photo: Warner Bros. Did you open Vulture’s ranking of the 101 best movie sequels of all time and urgently type “Control+F” “Blade Runner 2049,” only to learn that, no, Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 sci-fi sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 original is not on the list. Let us explain, and give you a glimpse into the debates that occurred over our two months of arguing about sequels.
But when Blade Runner 2049 came up in our collective discussions for the ranking, the movie became a bit of a lightning rod, and we ultimately decided not to include it. Let’s unpack that a little. Jen Chaney: Like Roxana, I also had Blade Runner 2049 on my initial list of sequels because I genuinely enjoyed getting absorbed into the world Villeneuve created and was less concerned about whether it felt enough like the original Blade Runner. Perhaps I wasn’t expecting it to do that? I don’t know, but as a TV critic, I take exception to the TV-ization of everything as an issue. There is a lot of great TV that does not overexplain, that leaves us with real questions and doesn’t coddle us.
Alison Willmore: I’m not sure that what’s at stake here is necessarily the idea of some properties being too sacred or too near and dear to one of our hearts to support a sequel. I find Blade Runner 2049, a movie I’d generally describe as fine, to be a failure as a sequel not because the original Blade Runner is untouchable but because 2049 it so literal about details that were previously allowed to be enigmatic, and so clunky about themes that were already explored so well in the first film.
One of the most maddening things about, for instance, the Ghostbuster battles of the past few years have been the ugly skirmishes over what an authentic sequel to that movie entails. Paul Feig’s much-maligned all-female Ghostbusters was by no means a great movie, but it was, like the original, a shaggy dirtbag comedy about mismatched co-workers catching ghosts.
B.E.: It’s true that Hollywood has weaponized nostalgia in not-always-tasteful ways. And our current tyranny of sequels is, of course, both a symptom and a cause of this weaponization. Once the studios ran out of new franchises to mine, they turned to the older ones — to Star Wars and Blade Runner and Mad Max and Rocky and others. As you guys have noted, what’s interesting is how we ourselves respond to individual movies as movies in and of themselves, freed from the shackles of the past.
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