Having spent this week re-watching what became the Hannibal Lecter trilogy, I was wondering what people view as their favourite prequel?
Obviously, given this opening, I’m going to go for Red Dragon, though I would give serious mentions to X-Men First Class and The Temple of Doom (though that doesn’t really count, does it?!).
Any thoughts for other candidates?
(PS: Anyone mention any Star Wars films and you’ll lose all credibility!)
I’d like to add, as some of my favourites:
Rise of the Planet of the Apes → Planet of the Apes
The Godfather Part II → The Godfather
And somewhat cheekily:
The Hobbit → Lord of the Rings
Similarly I’d like to mention:
The Hobbit - LotR
Prometheus - Alien
Perhaps the fact that neither of these have been released yet says something about the quality of prequels in general?
Does Casino Royale count or is that just a reboot?
I’d definitely agree about X-Men First Class. Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Godfather part 2 were pretty good too.
I asked myself the same question. I think it’s more a reboot than a prequel.
I’d have to count that as a reboot.
Similarly, I had originally put Godfather II in my post, but I don’t think it counts too much, since it’s a preq-seq, though annoyingly that’s not a given option in the empire franchise lexicon:
http://www.empireonline.com/features/movie-franchise-lexicon-infographic
Annoyingly, they’ve put down Red Dragon as a Re-adaptation, which intrigues me!
It’s a remake of Manhunter. I imagine it was done to make the series consistent with Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal (and probably also because they realised they could make a nice profit off it).
I think prequels are almost intrinsically not going to be very good. Very few escape from the problem that you already know (more or less) how it is going end. In most cases the previous film didn’t consider the back story worth showing so it’s probably not the best concept to base a film on.