BATTLE OF THE MOVIE SEQUELS

From now until December, fans can look forward to sequels, reboots and spin-offs of some of the biggest blockbusters.

SOME film buffs scoff at franchise movies, but sequels featuring caped saviours, space rebels, escaped dinosaurs and giant robots make up the highest-earning movies in Malaysia and Singapore.

With how Avengers: Infinity Wars is currently tracking at the box office and how

Black Panther tracked earlier this year (both are Marvel superhero movies), it looks as if they could stop, or even reverse, the decline in cinema viewership written about recently in this newspaper.

For fans of the big sequels, reboots or spin-offs, there is still a lot to look forward to almost every week until October.

The battle of the Movies With Colons In The Title will peak between May 24 and June 7, when Solo: A Star Wars Story and

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom go head to head. Which one will win the title of second-place box-office champ this year, after Avengers: Infinity War?

Chris Pratt’s dino trainer Owen in Jurassic Park is coming back to avert a scaly disaster while fan favourite Edna Mode, the scene-stealing half-German, half-Japanese costume designer, is returning in Disney/ Pixar’s Incredibles 2.

Some of the movies remix past stories (such as Ocean’s 8, which features an all-woman heist crew) or are spin-offs set in the same universe, such as Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Then there is that oddball category of movies that are technically sequels, but are actually reboots that tear up every movie that came before it.

One example would be Halloween ,the slasher flick that spawned a dozen copycats and almost as many sequels. Jamie Lee Curtis comes back as Laurie in a movie set 40 years after the original film.

Let us keep our fingers crossed that this summer’s big do-overs fare better than last summer’s. Anyone remember last year’s Tom Cruise turkey, The Mummy?