A LONG TIME COMING
The 14-year wait for the Incredibles II wasn’t too bad until they officially announced it in 2016 — those last two years nearly killed me. But it also got me thinking, which other movies had huge gaps between the original and the sequel? These are the ones I could find.
Beetlejuice 2
Okay, this might be cheating a bit, because I couldn’t find 100% confirmation, but if it comes out, it will be at least a 31-year gap between the 1988 original and this one. Winona Ryder stated she’d be on board for reprising her role as Lydia Deetz and Michael Keaton would be totally up for putting on the striped suit of the disturbingly amusing eponymous ghost once again.
Blade Runner 2049
A sequel to the cult classic dystopian cyberpunk epic that still has nerds arguing over the plot on the internet to this day, ‘Blade Runner 2049’ came out in 2017, 35 years after the original. Harrison Ford isn’t in the lead this time, but reprised his role as Rick Deckard. The movie seems to have been well received overall, so it’s a good thing that at least one great movie Ford starred in was given proper treatment, unlike ‘Star Wars’.
TRON: Legacy
Disney’s TRON came out in 1982 during the early years of home computers and video arcades and really played with people’s
fanciful concepts of what software was and what it was like inside a virtual world. The sequel, which came out 28 years later in 2010, was slick visually, sure, but they completely misunderstood what made the original so intriguing and instead of giving us a similar fanciful portrayal of our own current technology, simply gave us a string of impressive but shallow action scenes in a virtual world.
Scarlett
I’m not sure if this counts, because the sequel to 1939’s renowned romance drama ‘Gone with the Wind’ wasn’t a movie but a TV miniseries in 1994, almost 55 years later. It won some Emmys though.
Mary Poppins Returns
I’ve always wondered, if a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, what would Mary Poppins recommend for a suppository? My crude humour aside, the time between the 1964 family fantasy musical ‘Mary Poppins’ and its 2018 sequel was 54 years.