2024 movie sequels, ranked: Were any of them necessary?

In Hollywood, the question “Does this movie franchise need another chapter?” seems to have a pretty easy answer: “Sure, if we think it’ll still make money!”

For fans of a given franchise, though, the calculations are more complicated. Will that new installment in a movie series actually add anything worthwhile to the story, or just undermine the franchise’s original successes? Do we actually want to know more about our favorite characters, or will prequels and spinoffs ruin them? Do we have any reason to believe the latest movie using a familiar IP has a reason to exist that isn’t entirely mercenary? Will it at least be some big dumb fun?

So far, 2024 hasn’t given us many thumbs-up answers to those questions — but a few of the year’s franchise movies have done more to earn their box-office take than the rest. So we decided to run the numbers, ranking the year’s latest-in-a-series movies by how well they justify their existence — both as movies and as installments in ongoing stories.

10. The Strangers: Chapter 1

A remake of 2008’s home-invasion horror movie The Strangers wasn’t necessary, but it could have been good: With a premise as solid gold as “masked strangers break into a remote home and kill the couple vacationing there,” there are a million different takes that could have been great horror fodder that doesn’t follow the original movie beat for beat. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the uninspired approach director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2) takes with this movie, the first in a planned trilogy that was originally written as one massive four-hour-plus movie, until Legendary Entertainment broke it down into chunks.

This new batch of Strangers movies is meant to follow the characters in the aftermath of this initial home invasion. But it kicks off with Harlin essentially remaking the first Strangers with less style and dread. Gone is the slow creepiness of the original movie, replaced by rushed horror sequences and a few moments of lackluster action. While it’s possible that parts 2 and 3 somehow redeem the kickoff, Chapter 1 is nothing more than a significantly worse retread of an effective shocker. —Austen Goslin

Image: Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection

Madame Web is only loosely connected to Sony’s already loosely connected universe of Marvel characters. Ironic, given that the tagline “Her web connects them all” was the central focus of all the teasers. The one thing this offers to longtime fans of the current live-action Spider-Man narrative is a tease about Peter Parker’s existence — something that’s always been a big question mark in the Sony Marvel movies. Paramedic Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson) is friends with Peter’s (hot, young, not yet dead in a morally instructive way) Uncle Ben, after all! Except the film never actually acknowledges that Ben’s newborn nephew is Peter Parker, to the point where holding back on that detail becomes something like a bit. It’s almost pandering, but not indulgent enough to feel fulfilling at all.

With its stilted dialogue and nonsensical plot, Madame Web is not a good movie at all. At least it’s the sort of terrible movie that’s fun to watch in a group setting, while making jokes and tuning out the slower bits? It’s more or less Cats for superhero fans. —Petrana Radulovic

Photo: Sony Pictures

This sequel to a sequelish reboot brings the new generation of Ghostbusters (Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, etc.) back to New York, and brings back the original characters (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, etc.) for more than a glorified cameo. That might be enough to make it essential for superfans, but for everyone else, it’s a nostalgic callback to the original movie with not much new or engaging to make it stand out, apart from Grace’s character’s maybe-queer storyline with a cute ghost girl. —PR

Image: Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection

The fourth entry in the series Michael Bay inadvertently kicked off with his directorial debut Bad Boys back in 1995 brings back a lot of cast members — chiefly the Bad Boys themselves, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. But the filmmakers clearly think Bad Boys fans want a lot more continuity than that. Screenwriters Chris Bremner and Will Beall do their best to build a Fast & Furious-style Bad Boys universe out of every bit of character work and villain lore they can scrap together from the previous three movies.

That isn’t a compliment. Where so many blockbuster movies suffer because the studio is trying to launch a profitable franchise instead of telling a decent story, Ride or Die assumes viewers are coming to the theater armed with nostalgia and a detail-oriented fascination with lore, rather than just wanting to see a couple of gifted comedic actors mouth off at each other between frenetic action sequences. Fans who care deeply about the posthumous legacy of Joe Pantoliano’s character, this is your movie. But mostly, the franchise-building gets in the way of the fun. —TR

Image: 20th Century Studios

The fourth in the new-era Planet of the Apes movies (and the 10th Apes movie if you batch them all together) doesn’t add much to the franchise’s ongoing narrative — it jumps the story forward in time about 300 years for a story that’s frustratingly half-baked and surprisingly familiar from the previous entry, War for the Planet of the Apes, but with a gorilla dictator running a forced work camp instead of a human one. There are some powerful ideas at work — that history repeats itself, that communities are stronger than individuals, and that those communities need to band together to resist tyrants — but they aren’t communicated particularly clearly, especially since they’re mixed in with other threads, about a personal journey undercut by every Kingdom ad, and about the unreliability and unknowability of humanity.

Kingdom is enjoyable enough in the moment, an action blockbuster with impressive visual effects and some appealing characters. It isn’t a bad or boring entry in the series. It just never feels essential, or like it’s doing much besides echoing more propulsive, dynamic earlier entries in this run at the Apes story. —TR

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire feels like the movie where the new MonsterVerse franchise hit its stride. While 2014’s Godzilla lightly parodies disaster movies and 2017’s Kong: Skull Island does the same for dark war movies, Godzilla x Kong is a buddy movie about a giant ape and a nuclear lizard who don’t like each other much, but are often forced to team up to fight bigger monsters. It’s inescapably dumb and uncomplicatedly entertaining.

But what makes this franchise especially fun right now is that it has a secret weapon: television. While the big screen is reserved for silly monster brawls, the MonsterVerse’s TV show, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, is a much more reserved, character-focused family drama that feels like an old-school adventure movie with giant monsters thrown in. It’s an excellent counterbalance to the silly fun of movies like A New Empire, with the added bonus that the movie’s story likely means Kong will be in the show’s next season. The MonsterVerse is a strange franchise, but as long as every entry keeps proving itself entertaining, it’s awfully hard to complain. —AG

Image: Universal Pictures/Everett Collection

The adventures of panda kung fu master Po (Jack Black) could’ve been wrapped up in the series’ third installment back in 2016, but Kung Fu Panda 4 adds a bit of a postscript. The door is now open for another unlikely hero to take over the franchise, should DreamWorks decide to go that route: Basically, Po will eventually retire from his title as the Dragon Warrior, and a protégé will take up the mantle. (That definitely isn’t how it worked in the first movie, but I digress.) His heir apparent, the sneaky, thieving fox Zhen (Awkwafina), is actually a pretty cool character. I wouldn’t be too mad seeing more of her!

For the fourth movie in an animated series, Kung Fu Panda 4 is decently enjoyable, mostly suffering from wasted potential. But the fight scenes are still cool, and the humor is funny enough, even if it never reaches the highs of the originals. —PR

Image: 20th Century Studios/Everett Collection

The First Omen is a complicated addition to this list. On the one hand, it isn’t necessary, really. And its worst moments come at the close of the movie, when the implied connections to the original film series are made even more explicit than they already were. The First Omen does, however, earn its place on this list via an entirely different version of this metric: It might just be the best movie in the Omen series, which makes it a necessity by default.

Even better, by making a movie this scary, director and co-writer Arkasha Stevenson (Brand New Cherry Flavor) actually retroactively improves the rest of Damien’s story, just by making his origins this disturbing. The First Omen is simply an excellent horror movie, and that’s more than we can say for most franchise entries on this list, which is exactly why it clawed its way near the top. —AG

Image: Warner Bros. Entertainment/YouTube

Furiosa is the rare prequel that feels not just equal to the hit movie it’s setting up, but like it adds vital context rather than gilding the lily. Conceived and written at the same time as Max Max: Fury Road so it would be consistent with that film’s story and characterization, Furiosa doesn’t unnecessarily just fill in how-did-this-character-get-here blanks, it tells its own distinct story and answers questions about who Fury Road’s most compelling new character is, and why she’s Max’s equal. More importantly, though, it’s wildly entertaining in its own right. —TR

Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

The second half (or with luck, middle third) of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation has an advantage no other movie on this list has: It isn’t just an adjunct to other movies, it’s the vital continuation of an opening-act movie that was mostly setup, building to this payoff.

Even leaving aside the compelling performances and visuals, the epic warfare, and the fascinating shift in perspective — which is to say, leaving aside the fact that it’s one of 2024’s best movies so far — Dune: Part Two would top this list purely because it’s an essential part of its franchise’s story. It doesn’t just contribute new things to a franchise, it’s a cornerstone of the story Villeneuve is still hoping he’ll get to tell more of someday. —TR