Why Is It So Hard To Make A Good Comedy Sequel?

In an effort to satiate our overwhelming national hunger for more movies starring Kevin James, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 was unleashed on cinemas on Friday. In case you somehow missed the original Paul Blart: Mall Cop, here’s a brief rundown: Kevin James stars as the titular Blart, a mild-mannered, Segway-riding, hypoglycemic mall cop (his hypoglycemia prevents him from fulfilling his dream of being an actual cop) living in New Jersey. The mall is taken over by a band of criminals, holding his estranged daughter and potential love interest, among others, hostage. Paul, ultimately, does what the real cops cannot do and saves the day.

The original was critically panned, but netted a respectable $146 million at the box office. The money talked loudly enough to launch a sequel, relocating Blart to a security guard expo in Las Vegas, where he manages to stumble right into the middle of a casino heist. According to the movie’s synopsis, it is up to Paul to “single-handedly apprehend the crooks.” Sound familiar?

Making movies is an inherently risky business. You need the perfect alchemy of material, actors, and that ever-elusive “X Factor” to find success on the big screen. So the urge to replicate a previous success seems like a pretty surefire way to hedge your bets. It worked the first time, ergo it will work again. Right? Well, not always.

Don’t get me wrong: sequels can be great. Sequels have won Academy Awards (The Godfather Part II) and have been box office juggernauts (the recently released Furious 7 had the most successful opening weekend of any film in its franchise). But more often than not, comedy sequels specifically fall flat on their face. Why is it so difficult to make a good comedy sequel?

Action movies lend themselves to being serialized. You can add a new bad guy, more explosions, sexier love interests. But comedies are a different beast. A comedy sequel basically asserts, “Well, this made you laugh before, so it stands to reason it will make you laugh again.” But that notion fails to take into consideration the fact that so much of what makes a comedy successful has to do with novelty. The same joke just isn’t as funny the second time around; the same gimmick isn’t either.

But that doesn’t stop writers from recycling gags, or from resorting to typical sequel tropes. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 certainly isn’t the first sequel to geographically relocate its central character. The National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise made its name by doing just that time and time again. A change of scenery is presumed to be reinvigorating, an opportunity to drop characters into uncharted territory. If Paul Bart was funny in a suburban shopping mall (which is up for debate), then he’s certain to be hilarious in Las Vegas.

But is that necessarily true? Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, the 1999 comedy starring Rob Schneider as a fish tank cleaner who becomes an unlikely male prostitute, didn’t really need a sequel, but in 2005 it got one anyway: Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. The title gives away bad comedy sequel trope it employs: the relocation trope. Since the first installment presumably exhausted all of the bad sex work gags to be found on this continent, the second relocates Deuce Bigalow to Europe. But if you didn’t find the first film’s humor funny (the poster art for European Gigolo, featuring Deuce lounging on a bench in front of the Tower of Pisa, made to appear as it is his … uh … manhood pretty much sums up both films’ comedic ethos), it’s highly doubtful a change of scenery will help.

Many times, in fact, a change of scenery can serve as a death knell for a once successful franchise. Sex and the City — the TV series — was one of HBO’s most successful original programs. So it stands to reason that after the show ended its six-season run, HBO executives wanted to find a way to keep that Carrie Bradshaw cash coming in. They made a movie that, all things considered, was not as bad as it could have — and perhaps should have — been. If only they had stopped there!

But they forged ahead with Sex and the City 2, which includes a bad flashback sequence to show how the girls all met and – yep, you guessed it: geographic relocation! The girls take a trip to Abu Dhabi, because why not! Cultural differences (Manolo Blahniks do not fare so well in the desert) and bad puns (“Lawrence of my labia!”) abound. For a show that always treated New York as a central character, leaving New York felt like a contrived, and ultimately unsuccessful, way to revive the franchise.

“Upping the ante” is another commonly deployed trope. Take, for example, the Look Who’s Talking franchise. The first film had one talking baby. The second? Look Who’s Talking Too talking babies (and a nightmare-inducing talking toilet voiced by Mel Brooks). By the third, you have Danny DeVito and Diane Keaton playing talking pets.

And let’s not forget time travel! This week, a trailer dropped for Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser. (If you feel the need to start your trailer with a voiceover saying “This is going to be good,” I’m willing to bet it really isn’t.) The film — which will be released exclusively on the streaming site Crackle — promises to send David Spade’s Joe back in time. The present, apparently, doesn’t provide enough opportunities for his brand of redneck comedy. Perhaps the team behind Joe Dirt 2 has forgotten the terrible conceit of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (if only I could, too), in which the pizza-loving reptiles are sent back in time to 17th-Century Japan to save their beloved April.

Sometimes the desire to capitalize on a franchise’s initial success is so strong that the creative team is willing to forge ahead without the original stars attached. Take Jim Carrey, for instance. Carrey has made a career of playing the types of broad, zany — and, yes, oftentimes successful — characters that tend to lend themselves to sequels: Dumb and Dumber’s Lloyd, Ace Ventura (the sequel Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls relocated the famous pet detective to Africa). But even he couldn’t be persuaded to join the reboots of Dumb and Dumber — initially, at least. He would return for the series’ third installment, 2014’s Dumb and Dumber To — and Bruce Almighty. What to do when your bankable star refuses to return to their famous role?

Well, you have a few options. The Dumb and Dumber crew opted to take the flashback route with Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, casting Derek Richardson and Eric Christian Olsen to play younger versions of Carrey and Jeff Daniels’ original characters. Focusing on these characters in their salad days allowed them to cast younger — and presumably more desperate — actors to pick up the torch, with disastrous results. They were required to hew closely to the characterizations Carrey and Daniels had created for the characters in the original, removing any sense of originality, novelty, or surprise from their performances.

In the case of Bruce Almighty, the sequel shifted the focus to Steve Carell’s Evan Baxter, Bruce’s foil from the first film, and served as a modern-day telling of Noah’s Ark. The resulting film, Evan Almighty, is often cited as one of the worst comedy sequels in recent years for a number of reasons. One, it’s just a poorly made movie. And two, it tried to turn the original Jim Carrey comedy into a Steve Carell comedy. Carell has more than proved his comedic chops in his long run on NBC’s The Office and films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Instead of building a vehicle to complement his particular brand of comedy, they threw him in the middle of Carrey-land. His performance, like Richardson and Olsen’s in When Harry Met Lloyd, never quite made it out of Carrey’s shadow, to the detriment of the film.

Which brings us to the mortal sin of comedy sequels, that laziest of all the bad comedy sequel tropes: recycling. Recycling occurs when writers just regurgitate the same plots, with the pitiful hope that lightning will strike twice — or, sometimes, thrice — without audiences realizing that they’re being fed the same meal over and over. The Austin Powers series is a chief offender, though at least there was a little effort there to change up the plot lines a bit.

The worst offender of them all may be Weekend at Bernie’s II, a follow up to — can you guess? — Weekend at Bernie’s. What happens when you take a movie about two living guys carrying around a dead guy for a weekend convincing everyone he’s still alive so you can party at his beach house and decide to make a sequel? You get the exact same movie. Weekend at Bernie’s has the type of storyline that is only good for a single film. In trying to replicate their initial success (the sequel involves, yes, a relocation to the Virgin Islands, where Bernie’s body is reanimated by voodoo sorcery), the creative team instead made this gigantic stinker and, in doing so, barely brought in $12 million at the box office.

Perhaps, ultimately, the real problem is that sequels are so often glaringly obvious cash-grabs. One finds it hard to believe that there was a pure, driving creative need to send Paul Blart to Las Vegas. Paul Blart was sent to Las Vegas because the first Paul Blart film took in $146 million at the box office against its $26 million budget. Hollywood is a business, after all. It’s less of a gamble to bank on a recognizable character with a strong box office track record than to take a risk on a new comedy.

But thank god there are still some film execs out there willing to take that risk. Without those risk-takers, we might never have had Bridesmaids, Adventureland, Juno, or any other number of the exciting, original comedies of recent years. (This argument is not foolproof, of course. Without those risk-takers we probably would have been spared Last Vegas.) But as long as sequels continue to be good business for movie studios, I fear we should brace ourselves for more of the same. The tropes are there for the taking. After all, Paul Blart hasn’t gone back in time. At least not yet.

Brett Barbour is a writer who lives in Brooklyn and is prone to binge-watching.

Like what you see? Follow Decider on Facebook and Twitter to join the conversation, and sign up for our email newsletters to be the first to know about streaming movies and TV news!

Photos: Everett Collection