Joe Dante got handed a bigger budget and decided to burn it on jokes nobody asked for. Gremlins 2: The New Batch drops the small town charm for a Trump-tower-looking skyscraper and a talking Brain Gremlin who quotes Shakespeare. The film breaks its own fourth wall so often it barely functions as a sequel at all. That chaos is precisely why the people who love it refuse to hear a bad word about it. | © Warner Bros.
Slime, sewers, and a river of pink goo under Manhattan set the stage for a sequel nobody was desperate for. Ghostbusters II leans harder into slapstick than horror, giving Vigo the Carpathian a strange, flat menace compared to Gozer. The Statue of Liberty walking down the street remains one of the goofiest images the franchise ever produced. Fans forgive the thin plot because the cast still has that easy, lived-in chemistry. | © Columbia Pictures
Wes Craven closed out the trilogy by turning Woodsboro's rules inward, and the result split people fast. Scream 3 trades teenagers for Hollywood satire, following the cast into a movie-within-a-movie about the murders themselves. Some of the meta jokes land, some feel like the franchise laughing at its own exhaustion. It is messier than the first two, but the willingness to swing at something different is exactly why it still has defenders. | © Dimension Films
Mickey Rourke walks around Iron Man 2 with a pet bird and a thick accent, and somehow it works better than it should. The script juggles Whiplash, Justin Hammer, War Machine, and a new element for Tony's chest, and it buckles under the weight. Sam Rockwell oversells every scene he's in, which turns out to be the point. Fans still defend it because the mess feels like a party nobody wanted to leave early. | © Paramount Pictures
Devastator's testicles became a real topic of film criticism in the summer of 2009. Revenge of the Fallen runs two and a half hours of robots fighting in dust clouds nobody can parse. Skids and Mudflap talk in a way that aged badly the moment the credits rolled. None of that stopped it from making over $400 million, because loud and dumb has its own fanbase. | © Paramount Pictures
Nuking a fridge shouldn't have worked, and yet Indiana Jones survives the blast anyway in the opening act of Crystal Skull. Aliens, Shia LaBeouf swinging through trees with monkeys, a plot that leans hard on interdimensional beings instead of biblical relics. Harrison Ford still throws a punch like it costs him something. Nostalgia carried this one further than the writing ever earned. | © Paramount Pictures
Sam Neill returns to Jurassic Park III with visible reluctance, and the movie barely blames him for it. Spinosaurs snap a T-Rex's neck within the first act, undoing a decade of dinosaur hierarchy fans had memorized. The runtime clocks in under 95 minutes, thin even by summer blockbuster standards. It's the runt of the franchise, and that's exactly why some people root for it. | © Universal Pictures
Three separate storylines converge in At World's End, and for a solid hour you can feel the seams. Chow Yun-fat shows up as Sao Feng and gets sidelined almost immediately, which still bugs people who wanted more of him. The Brethren Court meeting alone has about nine characters fighting for screen time in one scene. Fans still line up behind it because Davy Jones and the maelstrom finale deliver spectacle nobody else was attempting at that scale. | © Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Topher Grace playing Eddie Brock felt like stunt casting the moment he opened his mouth as Venom. Emo Peter Parker dancing through New York became the clip everyone quotes, usually not as a compliment. Three villains got crammed into one runtime, and Sandman's entire arc suffers for it. People defend Spider-Man 3 anyway because Bruce Campbell's maitre d' scene and the practical effects still hold up better than the writing does. | © Sony Pictures Releasing
Neo fights a hundred copies of Agent Smith in a scene that runs so long it starts to feel like a technical demo. The Matrix Reloaded buries its philosophy under speeches, and the Architect monologue alone stops the movie cold for minutes. Zion's rave sequence divides people every single time it comes up. Even with all that, the freeway chase and the Burly Brawl remain some of the most ambitious action ever put on film. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Ripley wakes up on a prison planet with no Newt, no Hicks, and no explanation fans ever fully accepted. Killing off both characters offscreen between films felt like a betrayal to people who'd just spent a whole movie protecting them. Charles S. Dutton's Dillon gives the film its only real warmth, and it's not close. Bald, furious, and stripped of everything she loved, Ripley's version of Alien 3 still gets defended for having the guts to refuse a happy ending. | © 20th Century Fox
Nick Stahl replacing Edward Furlong as John Connor split the fandom before Terminator 3 even hit theaters. Kristanna Loken's T-X barely gets a personality beyond looking cold and shooting things. Killing Connor's fiancée offscreen and torching the "no fate" ending from "Judgment Day" felt like the franchise erasing its own homework. What keeps people coming back is that bleak, unearned finale: the machines win, and the movie has the nerve to sit in that. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Some sequels got torched by reviewers but built a loyal fanbase that swears they're underrated gems. Here are 15 sequels fans defend that critics never will.
