Sequels and Prequels That Tear Plot Holes in the Original
The only way to make any money in Hollywood today is to luck into a franchise you can run into the ground, but when you have to keep the same story going in perpetuity, it’s easy to write yourself into a corner. Sometimes, you have to take a few steps back to tell the story you want to tell. Sometimes, you have to step back until you body slam enough audience members that they’ve completely forgotten everything that’s come before.
Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith
George Lucas is the king of making it up as he goes along, previous events be damned, resulting most weirdly in Luke and Leia becoming siblings who have kissed. The most flat-out nonsense moment, however, is when Luke asks Leia in Return of the Jedi what she remembers of her biological mother, and she describes her as “beautiful, kind, but sad.” Considering Padme died about 30 seconds after Leia’s birth in Revenge of the Sith, that’s incredible recall for a newborn.
Monsters University
In Monsters, Inc., Mike tells Sulley, “You’ve been jealous of my good looks since the fourth grade,” but in the sequel, they meet for the first time at creature college. According to director Dan Scanlon, they simply weren’t interested in making Monster Babies, and now they like to think that “since the fourth grade” is just an old monster expression. This is all a joke to them.
Cruel Intentions 2
The plot of Cruel Intentions 2, which is confusingly a prequel, hinges on Sebastian Valmont being lost in a new world of wealth after his working-class father marries a wealthy woman, but in the first 10 minutes of Cruel Intentions, he refers to his stepmother as a “gold-digging whore.” By the end of the movie, his stepsister has tricked him, still more confusingly, into a threesome, raising questions about why he’s so eager to make a bet with her at the beginning of Cruel Intentions that would win him the right to sleep with her, something she says he’s wanted “since (their) parents got married.” Maybe they were struck with afflumnesia.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
Throughout the Harry Potter series, everyone keeps telling Harry that he has his mother’s eyes, which we’ve only seen on the face of fuzzy apparitions in mirrors and dancing photos. When Harry watches Snape’s dying memories, however, we see Lily Potter as a child with unmistakable brown eyes that blue-eyed Daniel Radcliffe notably doesn’t have.
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
But that’s far from the most egregious retcon of the Wizarding World. At the end of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, one of them scatters memory-erasing rain over the Muggle (sorry, ugh, “No-Maj”) population of New York City, but at the beginning of Crimes of Grindelwald, Newt’s No-Maj sidekick Jacob reveals that it “didn’t work” on him. Nevermind that Fantastic Beasts takes great pains to show that it did work on him, showing him walking away in a daze, telling his customers that he doesn’t know where he gets the ideas for his anima-shaped pastries, and not recognizing his magic girlfriend. The rain “only erases bad memories, and (he) didn’t have any.”
Death was too good for this series.