What Is the Best Belated Sequel Ever Made?

 Worth the Wait?

"I don't sail boats, Penny, I land on them."

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This is Def Rec,a blog about entertainment experiences you will definitely recommend. Movie minutia and television tidbits get ranked, rated, reviewed, and skewed, and in the end, you’ll know which one to Def Rec. I’m Jon McBrine, I’m an authority on popular entertainment and pop culture because I have access to the Internet.

Better late than never, or better not at all if late? Nostalgia is a great and powerful influence that causes many judgments to be clouded. We all have fond memories of the movies we grew up watching. Beloved heroes exist in our minds in a certain way. It’s natural to at least ponder what some of these characters might be up to, especially if it’s been a decade or two.

Several stars of yesteryear get revisited in a revival film or series, resurrecting long-dormant characters, and oftentimes the original cast is wheeled out to reprise their fan-favorite performances. But how long is too long to wait? Should we leave the memories alone? Well, if there’s money to be made, then soon isn’t soon enough, and the memories are whatever we want them to be. I’ll break down the top three movie sequels that awakened from their long slumbers, and then I’ll reveal which is the number one pick I recommend.

Bill & Ted Face the Music from 2020. Let’s get straight to the elephant in the room. The year 2020 was an odd era, to say the least. Blockbuster movies were forced to either wait out COVID or hit their target release dates, but just not in theaters. The long-awaited return of “Theodore” Logan and Bill S. Preston, Esquire was relegated to be a direct-to-streaming release, which may have been more convenient, but also severely lacked any sense of this being a massive movie moment. It was stripped of urgency since people could simply watch it at home, and, frankly, everyone had other things to worry about at the time.

But that’s not the awkward thing I’m referring to. No, the elephant I’m talking about is the title itself. In 1989, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter burst out of their time-traveling telephone booth and into the annals of pop culture with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. A sequel was released in 1991 called Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, featuring our two main guitar-playing heroes along with returning cast member George Carlin, the master time traveler Rufus, guiding the Wyld Stallyns to fulfill their musical destiny.

So there were two films where it was about Bill and Ted’s something, involving a quest of some kind—an adventure that turns out to be most excellent and a journey that was indeed bogus. After waiting about 30 years, a new generation of fans were treated to Bill and Ted not possessing a most triumphant trek or a non-heinous happening, but instead, the duo got a verb. For this new movie, Bill and Ted faced something, and fittingly enough, it was music, and their fate.

While it was fun to see the good-natured rockers reunite, this new film about the time travelers was anything but timeless. Reeves was essentially still in his John Wick era and pretty much looked the same, similar to how he appeared in his other delayed sequel, The Matrix Resurrections, which came out a year later in 2021, nearly 20 years after 2003’s The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions.

In Face the Music, Bill and Ted struggle to fulfill their prophesied destiny as the ones to unite the world through sweet tunes. Samara Weaving, Jack Quaid, William Sadler, Anthony Carrigan, Erinn Hayes, Jayma Mays, Hal Landon Jr., and Kristen Schaal fill out the cast in what was ultimately a bland comedy that no one really needed. It’s one of those legacy sequels that we all would’ve been fine without ever getting, but at the same time, if you had the main players at your disposal, you gotta go for it, right? Or maybe these dudes didn’t need to party on.

Reason to Rec: As is the case with a lot of sequels, sometimes the only reason to watch is the nagging sense of closure, also curiosity and an obligatory sense of completing something. After watching this movie, you can say that you did.

Psycho II from 1983. After 22 years in a psych ward, Norman Bates returns to the infamous motel where the horror started. Newly declared legally sane, Norman does what sane people do, and that is to do the same thing over again. Everyone knows that it isn’t insanity; it’s history repeating itself, duh.

Anyway, Norman attempts to live a normal life, but the demons of his past are everywhere he goes. Reopening Bates Motel proved to be not the healthiest idea because it is full of reminders of the murders he committed. Visions of his former self’s actions take their toll on Norman, and, well, it’s safe to say from the title, he goes psycho once more.

I’ll spare you the beat-for-beat recreation of each scene; I’ll leave that for Gus Van Sant and Vince Vaughn. What makes Psycho II an interesting sequel is that it’s not Norman escaping the mental institution or taking place entirely within an asylum. This belated sequel shows Norman legitimately trying to better himself, but of course, his inner nature, along with his less-than-calming environment, resurrected our favorite killer.

Psycho II was released in 1983, 23 years after the original Hitchcock film in 1960. Anthony Perkins reprised Norman Bates, and Vera Miles returned to once again play Lila Crane, the sister of Marion, Norman’s famous victim. Perkins would go on to direct and star in 1986’s Psycho III, a fun mid-’80s slasher, but overall was a bit generic compared to Part II’s more intriguing psychological thriller approach. Psycho IV: The Beginning was a Showtime made-for-cable movie and is mainly Norman calling into a radio show and telling his life story. In what is essentially a prequel, this entry adds the wrinkle of Norman having a baby mama, and he is worried that he’ll pass on his dangerous DNA to his unborn son—and isn’t that a fun visual, Norman getting it on.

A Bates Motel exists and is about a guy who roomed with “reformin’ Norman” at the mental institution and inherits the motel after Norman’s death. Then there’s the aforementioned 1998 remake, and after that, there is the Bates Motel television series that debuted in 2013.

Reason to Rec: As far as the films go, Psycho II stands out as the most intriguing, so out of the Psycho movies, Part II is an easy recommendation.

Top Gun: Maverick from 2022. The 1986 film Top Gun has been a high-flying favorite for years. It serves as a perennial motion picture that represents the pinnacle of an entire decade’s sense of style. Aside from the Mission: Impossible movies and Jack Reacher, Tom Cruise doesn’t normally do sequels very often. Recapturing the magic of his original outing as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell was a steep challenge, but Tom Cruise is not a guy who backs down from any daunting undertaking.

Making a sequel decades after the original came out—heck, producing a good sequel in general—is a Herculean task in itself, especially when there’s the risk of tainting such a beloved legacy. Much like his high-stakes stunts in his movies, Tom Cruise accepted one highly improbable mission, and things got even more difficult to pull off as time went on.

Top Gun 2 was supposed to be released in theaters in 2019, but was delayed due to the complexity of the aerial scenes and all-around crazy awesome set-piece stunts. Then COVID-19 made everyone go crazy, and there was the threat of relegating it to a straight-to-streaming platform. Not on Tom Cruise’s watch. The mega movie superstar moved heaven and earth and contacted governments, theater owners, studio bigwigs. TC wanted this movie to be shown on the silver screen, and he got it done.

The big screen means big money, and the cast and crew benefited from a successful summer release at the box office. And what a special moment it was for Val Kilmer to once again share a scene with Cruise. Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Jon Hamm, Danny Ramirez, Miles Teller, Monica Barbaro, Charles Parnell, Greg Tarzan Davis, Jay Ellis—the list goes on, but every member of the cast brought their A-game in what turned out to be the movie America needed. Nature was indeed healing when Top Gun: Maverick took off after a period of lockdowns and uncertainty. All society really needed was Tom Cruise blowing vaguely European bad guys out of the sky.

Reason to Rec: This is TC doing what he does best, top-to-bottom entertainment.

DEF REC

If you watch one of these films, make it Top Gun: Maverick. Psycho II is definitely worth it, but the one I definitely recommend above the others I went over is Tom Cruise pulling off yet another seemingly impossible mission, and that is to make a belated sequel that is legitimately good.

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Books by Jon McBrine

The Eric Icarus Series

Unable to hide his flying abilities, a shy high school student’s plan to hide in plain sight as just another superhero backfires after an attack leaves him as the only hope to stop a diabolical villain.

Recruited by tech mogul Baron Maddox, Eric Boxworth becomes Eric Icarus, a maskless member of the Super Society, tech-based defenders of New St. Cloud City. Eric’s miraculous, natural flight power is disguised by a decoy anti-gravity backpack to avoid getting dissected in a lab. Eric and his bubbly, good-natured classmate Jaycee - the armored hero Powerhouse - must stop a madman from creating an empire built on stolen powers. Fans of young superheroes, found family tropes, and high-stakes action will love this YA sci-fi adventure series.

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