The 27 worst movie sequels of all time

14 years after the steamy original, someone decided to see if lightning could strike twice. It didn't.

Sharon Stone returns to play crime novelist (and serial killer) Catherine Tramell, but with no Michael Douglas acting across from her — and a bewildering plot — the movie is an absolute dud.

It's arguably the movie that put the nail in the coffin for this Batman franchise.

The incredibly bizarre costumes. The strange set design. Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze. Yeah, that's late-1990s superhero movies in a nutshell, and director Joel Schumacher drove us headfirst into the madness. 

Talk about a sequel no one wanted! Eighteen years after director John Landis and stars John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd created one of the greatest comedy musicals of all time with "The Blues Brothers," Landis and Aykroyd went and polluted the legacy with this awful sequel.

There are just some things that aren't redeemable.

Making a sequel to one of the greatest found-footage movies of all time led to a very conventional horror sequel with a director known best for making documentary films, Joe Berlinger (who has said since that the movie was taken away from him by the studio). The result is a how-to on making a bad sequel.

This is still probably the strangest plot left turn I've ever watched. In a franchise that is built around fun relationship comedy troupes, for the sequel, Bridget Jones ends up in a Thai prison after authorities found cocaine in a gift she was asked to pack in her suitcase. 

I'm still baffled by this plot twist.

Some comedies should never try to be given a sequel, and this is definitely one of them.

Attempting to do another zany comedy on the golf course, but this time with a better animatronic golfer, what we get a lot of tired jokes from Jackie Mason and Chevy Chase looking like he's just there to collect a check.

Though the Farrelly brothers wanted no involvement in a sequel that looked at their "Dumb & Dumber" characters in high school, that didn't stop New Line from coming up with their own. This is one of the rare instances when someone should have listened to the Farrellys.

Though we thought it wouldn't get any worse after 2007's "Live Free or Die Hard," it turns out it actually can with this movie. By this point in the franchise, Bruce Willis isn't going through the motions as John McClane, he's sleepwalking.

After M. Night Shyamalan gave us "Split," which turned out to be a surprise sequel to his 2000 hit "Unbreakable," audiences were super excited to see all the characters converge for this movie.

But Shyamalan could not repeat the success of "Split." Instead, we got a frustratingly bad superhero movie that wants to be so grounded in reality that the director had one of his main characters die by drowning in a puddle.

When you go and make arguably the greatest sequel of all time, it's likely a studio is going to throw money at you until you finally make a third. That's what happened to director Francis Ford Coppola.

After making two of the most memorable movies ever, he tried to go for the hat trick. And though the (presumably) final feature-length tale of the Corleone family has grown in acceptance over the years, it still is hard to watch. 

If you thought the original didn't have any kind of plot then you'll be amazed by how little the characters do in the sequel. Obviously the songs are why you're watching it in the first place, but none of them come close to the classics in the first movie.

"The Hangover" sequel is an example of a studio starving to make a hit into a franchise. "Part II" pretty much goes through the same jokes as the first one but this time set in Thailand. Honestly, the movie really has no reason to exist. Oh, they made a "Part III," by the way. 

Adam Scott replacing John Cusack in the sequel should be the first indication that this movie wasn't gonna cut it. And things get worse the deeper you get into this awful time travel comedy that destroys everything great about the original movie.

Will Smith had no problem skipping the sequel to one of his biggest blockbuster hits. And it proved to be the right choice as we have to sit and watch poor Jeff Goldblum try to carry a sequel that had no business getting made.

A big reason I'm skeptical about another Indian Jones movie is that I still can't get rid of the bad taste of the last one. The end of "Crystal Skull" is the worst footage I've ever seen Steven Spielberg make. Many others are still baffled by the movie, too. 

This third movie in the "Meet the Parents" franchise is the perfect example of audience exhaustion.

After two movies where Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro throw dirty looks at one another, by the third movie we all were just ready for this thing to end.

This marks the final movie in the "Jurassic Park" franchise that Steven Spielberg directed (though he's been heavily involved as a producer in the movies since).

It is laughably awful. Despite Spielberg's undisputed greatness, this movie proved that the franchise needed new blood at the helm.

After "The Matrix" became a sensation it was obvious there would be another movie. And what we got was a massive story that they had to break up into two movies to tell.

The hype was so big around Neo and his quest to become "The One" that the result never could live up to all our expectations.

Jamie Kennedy attempts to do his best Jim Carrey impression and turns out a performance that can only be described as Razzie-worthy (in fact, he was nominated, but the award went that year to Rob Schneider for "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo"). 

With a title like that, it's not hard to figure out why Keanu Reeves said no to the sequel. But seriously, he was out long before the studio probably thought up this awful thing, that's become regarded as one of the worst event films ever made.

It's hard to believe a movie could veer so far from its original's style and originality. But this one pulled it off.

By the third film in the Sam Raimi era of the web slinger, you could see the burnout from the director and his two leads, Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. The movie didn't have the same life as the previous two and Venom couldn't even grab audiences' attentions. 

The late 1980s was an interesting time. We were coming out of the Cold War and peace was a big theme throughout the world. So why wouldn't we make a movie where Superman collects all the nuclear weapons the world ever created and throws them into the sun?

The problem is we got a poorly produced movie with lame special effects and yawn-inducing action sequences. 

In this sequel to the popular 1985 high school movie starring Michael J. Fox, this time Jason Bateman tries to take the spotlight. But it in no way captures the same magic of laughs and teen hijinks that the Fox movie had.

There have been a lot of "Terminator" movies that haven't been good, but this one is awful.

Starring Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor and Arnold Schwarzenegger returning once more as the terminator, this movie with its time travel plot is instantly forgettable after watching it.

Though this movie has Mark Wahlberg swinging around a huge sword and the movie opening with Stanley Tucci playing a drunk Merlin, the latest Michael Bay-directed "Transformers" movie is a mess of forgettable action sequences and mind-numbing CGI.

Some sequels miss their window and that's what happened with Oliver Stone's return to the world of Wall Street.

Gordon Gekko trying to get back into the game after serving jail time didn't have the edge of the original. Perhaps because the stocks and banking world had more of an appeal to audiences in the gluttonous 1980s than in the financially strapped 2000s. 

Chalk this one up to another great comedy that has no business having a sequel.

15 years after the original, Ben Stiller finally gave in to everyone asking him if there would be another "Zoolander" and went and made one. It was a big mistake. It's not like the original had some kind of enthralling plot, but compared to its sequel it makes that one look like "Citizen Kane."