Sequels, Prequels, and Whatever

You can bet that if anything sells well, be it a movie, a novel, or another kind of storytelling, someone will sooner or later try to cash in on it again. They’ll try to make a sequel or turn it into a series. I’m a little guilty of that myself, but I realized there was going to be more than one story about Jane or Inez or John while I was still in the early stages, so I set them up to work as characters for a series from the get-go. There was no ‘sold well, let’s make another’ involved.

There is a definite difference between writing a series from the beginning (or from early stages, when you can still go back and change things) and coming back later to work with the same material again. There’s also different ways to do that.

Sequels are an obvious way. You just take all the characters people loved and put them through another adventure. But sequels are difficult - much more difficult than most people think. Only few of them really work and most do by avoiding the most obvious way of creating a sequel: telling the same story again. Two good examples for sequels which did it right are “Kung Fu Panda 2” and “Despicable Me 2.” None of them told the same story again.

“Kung Fu Panda 2” switched from ‘lovable, but absolutely unfit main character becoming a Kung Fu master’ to ‘lovable and surprisingly agile panda learning about where he came from.’ They had an ideal pairing for the hero and the villain (as did the first one), they raised the ante well (from merely ‘former student coming back to claim what he thinks is his’ to ‘a threat for all of Kung Fu and all of China’), and they balanced out the fun, the drama, the background, and the actual happenings very well. The fact that the first movie already established that Po was an orphan (since the goose who raised him definitely isn’t his biological father) worked in favour of the second movie.

“Despicable Me 2” didn’t try to do the same story again, either. It told what happened after the end of the first movie. Gru has adopted his girls and he’s trying to go legal, but is still struggling. As a former villain of renown, he is drafted by the anti-villain league to help with a worrying crime clearly committed by an experienced villain. The movie added another layer by having Gru fall in love - which went well with the girls, especially the youngest one, missing a mother. “Despicable Me 3” also did its work well, but I’ve already written a post about that.

What did both do well? They didn’t try to rehash the story of the first movie. That is the main problem with sequels - they’re often doing the same thing over and over again. And that is why they fail. That is why they are not as successful as the original. So if you decide to write a sequel with the characters you used before, make sure it’s a new story which could happen to them.

Prequels (here an old post from my other blog) are less obvious as a choice, but often necessary, when important or popular characters die in the story you want to do cash in on again. In a prequel, everyone is still alive. That’s the good side. The bad side - at least for the kind of story where half of the characters don’t get to see the end of it - is that you can’t kill any of the characters who need to be alive in the original story. In addition, the ending is already determined from the beginning.

Star Wars did a spectacularly bad job of making the prequels - but I already wrote a longish post about how to do it better in my other blog - while doing an amazing job with a prequel series in the original extended universe. “Knights of the Old Republic” (KOTOR for shorter) includes a series of comics and two RPGs for the computer (done wonderfully well by Bioware) and is set 4,000 years before the original trilogy, which means none of the characters you know from the movies makes an appearance (even Yoda is a good deal younger than that, after all). That gave KOTOR a huge freedom - and the stories found their way into the extended universe of Star Wars, when a villain from the KOTOR series was use (in spirit form) in a trilogy and another story set after the original movies (I refer to the Jedi Academy Trilogy and the novel “I, Jedi”).

Extended universes allow for a lot of additional material, by the way. Instead of only making direct sequels or prequels, you can put new characters into the setting, expand side characters in their own stories, and flesh out the universe you created even more. Some series work on the extended universe principle (Discworld, for instance, has several main characters and also stories build around characters turning up only once or twice), others do not.

If more than one person works on a series, extended universe or not, then you will need some kind of reference. Pre-Disney Star Wars did that by insisting all novels (from the Thrawn Trilogy onwards, that is) should run along the same main timeline. Discontinuity could be explained by what the characters knew or thought they knew, as long as it wasn’t too severe.

Other stories (such as the new pulps by Airship 27, which are based around the main characters) keep a ‘bible’ which includes the main points about characters and worlds, so every writer knows what is set in stone and needs to be obeyed (since it would be very bad, if one made the Black Bat drop his ‘I’m blind’ act in public, for example) and what can be toyed with. There will always be discontinuity in a series written by more than one person, but both an extended universe and a character-based series can be shared, if people are a bit careful with the base material.

Sometimes, TV series get turned into movies (as with “Firefly” or “X Files”). Sometimes, movies get turned into a TV series (as with “Buffy” or “The Librarians”). In both cases, there might be problems.

Closing off a series which ended too soon, like “Firefly,” with a movie might be a very good idea. You can finish the story and give the audience closure. Or you can overdo it, of course, and end up with an ending which nobody wants - making the audience wish they could just go and ignore the movie (which they can on a personal level, of course). On the other hand, movies usually have a higher budget, so you can invest in a bigger story.

Movies which later on spark a TV series often come with a different set of problems, though. In most cases, the same cast won’t be available for the TV series. In most cases, you have much less budget and have to find a good reason to move everything somewhere else. In most cases, you need to severely expand the basics to keep a series running for a season or more. “The Librarians” did that extremely well, by the way. The movies came first, showing us one librarian and his daily work for the Library. When the series rolled around, they expanded the universe (see above), and introduced three ‘junior librarians’ who were brought in to learn the ropes (since librarians don’t grow old on the job) and their handler (see the ‘don’t grown old’ part). Then they destroyed the Library, making the librarians go to a branch office with a highly-experienced administrator. Since the main lead from the movies turns up every now and then in the episodes (often in the season finales), there is continuity. At the same time, the focus now is on the five new main characters (three librarians, one handler, one experienced administrator).

As I said, most problems arise when people try to turn a single story created as a such into something longer, like a series, a sequel, or a prequel. If you plan a story out for several books (adding an over-reaching story arc) or plan your characters so you can use them for several stories, you will not face the same problems.

What you should keep in mind, if you want to expand on a story later, is if your characters and/or universe will hold up for more than the original concept. You will have to get down a new story (best would be something completely different, as the shift from the training of Po to the danger to Kung Fu in the first two “Kung Fu Panda” movies). You will have to open up the universe, show new sides of your characters. Optimally, they will grow and become better and stronger than they were before. You also have to decide whether you want some kind of timeline or whether you just want to tell new stories without stating when in the characters’ lives they are set.

Not all prequels are as horrible as the Star Wars ones. Not all sequels are inherently bad. But before you expand on an existing story, you should think about what you want to do and whether you’re trying ‘same old’ or something new. Even if the first story was highly successful, ‘same old’ rarely is a good choice.