Richard Crouse

Twenty three years have passed since the original film won an Academy Award for lead actor Michael Douglas and a Razzie for supporting actress Daryl Hannah which means that many current second year university students weren’t even born when Gordon Gekko made the words “Greed is good” famous.

Twenty-three years is a stretch but it is more common than you think for years, and sometimes even decades to pass between source and sequel.

Return to Oz, based on the second and third Oz books and made forty-six years after the classic MGM film, picks up the story six months after Dorothy returned to Kansas. The film held a Guinness Book of World Records notation as the sequel with the longest gap from its original until it was bumped off by Fantasia/2000, which came a whooping fifty-nine years after Fantasia.

Not record breaking, but still substantial are The Color of Money, which trailed The Hustler by twenty-five years and An American Werewolf in Paris which bounded into theatres sixteen years after An American Werewolf in London.

Sci fi fans also had to wait sixteen years for the follow up to 2001 A Space Odyssey. 2010: The Year We Make Contact featured a whole new cast (save for Douglas Rain who reprised his role as the voice of HAL 9000) but original director Stanley Kubrick was given a cameo of sorts. He can be seen as the Soviet premier on the cover of Time magazine.

Speaking of directors, it’s unusual for the original director to come back and direct a sequel a decade later, but Troy Duffy, stuck to his guns (literally) and ten years after The Boondock Saints came The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day. “To me, the successful sequels in the past have given you everything you’ve loved from the first film, plus a brand-new storyline that you could never have predicted,” said Duffy.

Oliver Stone, who had never made a sequel to any of his films before remounting Wall Street, seems to have followed Duffy’s advice filling his new film with touchstones from the original, but let’s hope he’s joking when he says, “I should go back and do ‘Son of Scarface’ or something!”