Early this year we featured a list of franchises in need of a genre change. The Rambo series was not one of the five selected, but apparently Sylvester Stallone thinks it’s a good idea to take a turn into sci-fi for the fifth installment of the action franchise. This, after the Indiana Jones series took a disappointing leap into alien territory last year. This, despite the fact Moonraker is one of the worst James Bond films.

The funny thing is, it’s difficult to find a straight up action or action/adventure franchise that doesn’t have sci-fi elements anymore. So wouldn’t it be nice to have these few series remain grounded in reality if they started that way? We think so. That’s why we’re going to beat Hollywood to the punch on a few action franchises that have yet to add aliens, monsters or whatever to their world.

The following five premises are completely ridiculous, and that is the point. Hopefully the series’ respective studios will thereby see that it would be a bad idea to do anything of the sort.
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I apologize for being such a negative S.O.B. this week, but at least it seems to help with other blogs‘ dry spells as far as comments go, so I’m going to continue my “concern trolling” today in order to announce my low expectation for this Alien prequel, for which Fox reportedly is now bringing Ridley Scott back to the franchise to direct. I have a general distaste for prequels, so I’m obviously biased. I admit this completely. But what could really be the benefit to this? So we can actually witness the back story of the xenomorphs? If this is to be like most villain origins, I anticipate finding out the aliens were all orphans and/or had lost a childhood love to disease.

Okay, fine, I’ll end on a positive, hopeful note: if Scott can make the prequel less an explanation for why the xenomorphs are so evil and instead make an Alien film that’s basically Black Hawk Down in space (or is that what Cameron’s Aliens was?), I will totally be on board for this. I do like both Alien³ and Alien: Resurrection, so I guess I’m pretty much obligated to give this a chance.

Check out the rest of the film blog reactions after the jump:
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We’re so amazed by the stellar reviews of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (if not for Manohla Dargis, Rex Reed and Wesley Morris the top critic score on Rotten Tomatoes would be 100%), that we wondered if it’s the best-received sixth installment of a series ever. And from what we can tell, until some late-come party crashers show up to ruin things, it appears to be nearly true.

Of course, it’s not like there was much competition from past franchises. By the sixth movie most film series are cheap, tired and nearly void of remaining followers. However, there have been a few worthwhile Part 6s, enough to show us that it’s sometimes acceptable for Hollywood to keep going with a film property (even without the excuse and benefit of a popular long-running book series).
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There will be sequels to both Star Trek and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Not only are these now officially greenlit, but they’re also what we call “likely sequels” prior to their certainty — meaning we all saw them coming way before Paramount and Fox, respectively, announced them. However, it’s not necessarily a given that a successful movie will always spawn a follow-up. For example, box office record-holder Titanic could never become a franchise.

Of course, people will always joke about the possibilities for a Titanic sequel, and that kind of humor is what makes the Twitter meme #unlikelysequels so entertaining. Unfortunately, 140 characters allows for little more than a proposed sequel title (and yes, “Titanic 2: Jack’s Back” is among them), so we have decided to expand on ten favorites by providing the synopsis and, for some, casting suggestions.
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The new action film sequel Crank: High Voltage is being advertised with the tagline “He was dead…But he got better.” Aside from sort of ruining the ending to the first Crank for those of us who haven’t seen it, this copy from the posters has been receiving a lot of attention for how ridiculous it sounds. Fans of the original have to disagree with the tagline, because they know Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) was not dead; in fact it is clear from the final scene that he miraculously survived that fall from the helicopter. Meanwhile, people less familiar with the movie simply find the idea of a dead character being resurrected for the benefit of a sequel to be laughably unacceptable, as if such an idea is unheard of in Hollywood.

But even if Chelios had been officially declared dead at the end of Crank, the sequel certainly wouldn’t be the first to revive a main character for a follow-up. Obviously horror films do it all the time, and it’s not exactly uncommon in sci-fi, fantasy, action and comic book genres, either. Even while ignoring the invincibility convention of contemporary slasher films, we were able to select six sequels in which a deceased (or presumed deceased) character returns.

Warning: Spoilers may be found after the jump.
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Next week, Vin Diesel returns (along with Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordanna Brewster) to the Fast and the Furious franchise, which he’d abandoned after the first movie (he did have a cameo in part 3). When news first hit that he’d be reprising the role of Dominic Toretto for the fourth installment, simply titled Fast & Furious, most of us saw the actor as returning under a veil of shame. Because he initially departed the series with an inflated ego — and with it unrealistic salary demands — it does seem obvious that Diesel is now only desperately crawling back because his career failed to take off the way he’d hoped it would.

This is quite sad considering not even Steve Guttenberg ever crawled back to the Police Academy movies, nor did Burt Reynolds ever get dragged back for a fourth Smokey and the Bandit. But there have been other shameful returns by stars to franchises they’d previously sat out of (whether the hiatus was of their own choosing or not). Only one of these may have been as desperate as Diesel now appears, but it’s worth looking at four additional actors and actresses who should be very embarrassed of their delayed reprisals.
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If Tyler Perry gets an Oscar nomination for his acting in Madea Goes to Jail, can a washed-up actress scold him for taking away female roles? Actually, could it just be Cuba Gooding Jr. in drag, a la Boat Trip?

Seriously, though, Madea won’t be up for any Academy Awards next year, but damn is Perry’s character popular. Enough that the sassy matriarch has now evolved from a supporting character into the star of her own vehicle (which gave the filmmaker his biggest opening yet this past weekend). Yes, it’s true that Madea is a central figure in most of Perry’s films and has previously been the main protagonist in his plays (including the one Madea Goes to Jail is based on), but in the movie world she was introduced as a secondary role in Diary of a Mad Black Woman. So, now she belongs in that small club of supporting characters who’ve earned their own film(s); other members of which include Jay and Silent Bob, Bruce and Lloyd, Cousin Eddie, Marshal Samuel Gerard, the Scorpion King and Wolverine.

And Madea is one of the very few female characters to belong to the club, which is another good reason for an actress to scold Perry. But the problem also lies with the people who write woman characters, apparently, since in coming up with ten other supporting characters who deserve their own spin off, we managed to only include two females on our list. Perhaps if we’d permitted classic film characters there’d be more to choose from — though even then we might be more likely to include a Peter Lorre or a William Demarest role than a Thelma Ritter or Eve Arden.
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• Robert Downey Jr has signed on to star as Tony Stark in Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, and The Avengers. This, plus his starring role in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, will put the Less Than Zero survivor in at least one summer tentpole per year through 2012. Say it with me: poor, poor Andrew McCarthy.
• Mike Nichols will direct a David Mamet-scripted remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low. Martic Scorsese comissioned the script from Mamet; he’ll now executive produce.
• In an unusual deal, Janus and sister company Criterion Collection have acquired theatrical and DVD rights to Revanche, the Austrian Foreign Language Oscar contender which premiered in Berlin and went on to Telluride. Janus, known for its library of classic art films, hasn’t handled a first-run theatrical release in 30 years.

The third part in Universal’s rebooted Mummy franchise takes the series in a new direction. Rather than set in Egypt and dealing again with the same old villain, Imhotep, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor brings us to China and gives us a different sort of preserved corpse baddie. And it looks like the change could actually add some freshness to the franchise.

Of course, history would hint that such a move for the Mummy movies is a bad idea. While it seems beneficial in theory to redirect the focus of a series with the third installment, especially if the first sequel was too much a repetition of the original (a la The Mummy Returns), in practice many threequels mistakenly alter things for the worse. These aren’t necessarily the worst threequels ever made (*cough* X-Men: The Last Stand); they’re just some movies that took their series in a completely wrong turn.

1. Halloween III: Season of the Witch - Now viewed as an unfortunate detour in a long series involving the slasher Michael Myers, this misstep can apparently be blamed on John Carpenter and co-writer/producer Debra Hill, who agreed to a second sequel to Halloween only if it didn’t involve Myers. But what was the point? Sure, a franchise can work with unrelated sequels, but after two movies dealing with the same villain, it seems odd to switch it up so late in the game. Still, if this wasn’t such a terrible movie in general, it’s possible Halloween III could have worked as an intended beginning to an anthology franchise.
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Video games today are great for recreating scenes from old films (such as The Godfather) and plopping you into the action. But how faithful do a game’s sequences need to be? From the way Sierra Entertainment is advertising its new Ghostbusters video game, I guess you want the gaming to be as close to the direction of the original film as possible. Not only does the new trailer for the game include many scenes from the first Ghostbusters movie, it displays side-by-side comparisons of footage from the film and the game. Because what would the game be without a near-identical shot of library catalog cards shot into the air?

Interestingly enough, the game is not actually a total video game remake of Ghostbusters. Instead, it’s “an all new story you won’t see in theaters,” featuring a script by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, who also wrote both the original and the sequel, and the voices of Aykroyd, Ramis, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, William Atherton and Brian Doyle-Murray, all reprising their roles from the films (I understand Sigourney Weaver opting out, but why no Rick Moranis?). Of course, it does require you to battle old favorites, such as Slimer, Gozer, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and Vigo (”master of evil”), but there will also be new villains, including the biggest paranormal problem the Ghostbusters have ever seen.

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• Variety says Hellboy 2 “did hellacious business in debuting to an estimated $35.9 million.” This seems to be a compliment. Meanwhile, Meet Dave bombed, and Journey to the Center of the Earth made a very respectable $20 mil on just 854 3D screens.
• Richard Linklater, Mike White and Jack Black will collaborate on a sequel to School of Rock, and it’s got what’s destined to rival Babe 2: Pig in the City for mockable sequel titles: School of Rock 2: America Rocks. Where’s the exclamation point?
  
• Terribly Happy, a Danish crime film, took the top prize at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival over the weekend. Man on Wire took the documentary prize, and there was also a “special mention” for Bigger, Stronger, Faster.

Until last year’s brilliantly directed Ratatouille, all of Pixar’s animated features could be summed up with one word (toys, bugs, monsters, fish, superheroes, cars). Then the more complex plot synopsis of “rat functions as a culinary Cyrano in a French restaurant’s kitchen” came along and ruined the studio’s tradition of simplistic scenarios. Fortunately, this year Pixar is back on track with Wall-E, a movie that can be summed up as being about, in a word, robots.

But in their pipeline they’ve got a couple sequels (Cars 2, Toy Story 3) and a couple multi-word synopses (2009’s Up and 2011’s The Bear and the Bow are, at the least, each described with two words: old man and fairy tale, respectively. Only 2011’s Newt could have been pitched using a single word: newts.

So, while Pixar seems like it currently has enough on their hands, I’d like to suggest a few more single-word pitches for animated films in order to get things back to basics:

1. Birds - They’ve given us a movie featuring a variety of bugs and a movie featuring a variety of sea creatures, so the obvious next place to go is a movie featuring a variety of birds. And since Pixar has already made a short about birds (For the Birds), they already have a starting point to jump off from.

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The sequel to Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle opens in theaters today, and you can read my SXSW review of the movie, titled Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, over here. Though I enjoyed it, H&K2 disappointed me for taking on too much plot. But apparently some other reviews are favoring the second installment, and according to Craig Phillips at Green Cine, the matter has critics divided.

Phillips, who marginally prefers the sequel, uses the opportunity to revisit those sequels that improved upon the original. Obviously, the list includes The Empire Strikes Back, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and The Road Warrior. However, surprisingly, The Godfather Part II is not in the top ten, because he considers the first and second films tied, and he claims both Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Gremlins 2: The New Batch are only honorable mentions, because their definite superiority is up for debate (true, I’ve never been able to decide if I like them better than their respective counterparts).

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I probably shouldn’t even legitimize this with a post, but what the hell, it’s Friday: OK! Magazine, that bastion of fairness and accuracy in reporting (see their previous “scoop” from earlier this week) is reporting that Heath Ledger is about to sign on to star in a sequel to Brokeback Mountain:

“It will follow the nasty process of being openly gay in 1963 Wyoming, an insider tells OK!. “Ennis will finally come out of the closet.”

Defamer, noting that Ang Lee’s film followed Ledger’s Ennis DelMar through to 1983, calls bullshit:

Escape from Brokeback Mountain promises to mine all the nasty gay processes missed by the original, while setting the stage nicely for part three, Brokeback Revolutions, in which our hero finally reaches the fabled realm of Zion (which looks a lot like a leather-themed circuit party in Fort Lauderdale).