Cliffhangers That Sequels Totally Ignored

These days, it's almost a rarity for a movie to end without leading into some sort of sequel or franchise; in an age of reboots, remakes, re-imaginings, and cinematic universes, movies are almost required to end with a cliffhanger of some sort. It can be a great way to get an audience excited for the sequel, after all — if the audience wants to see how that hanging plot thread is addressed, they'll have to buy tickets for the next installment. Whether it's the seemingly vanquished horror movie monster rising from the dead (again) or just the foreshadowing of an upcoming adventure, cliffhangers prime an audience full of expectations.

Unfortunately, a lot can change between movies. Directors leave projects and long-term priorities change, leaving compelling cliffhangers to dangle in the wind. From supervillain origins that were never resolved to apocalyptic endings that were reset by the next film, here are cliffhangers that movie sequels ignored.

"Species" isn't the only horror series to ignore a food-related apocalyptic cliffhanger. The "Children of the Corn" franchise took a fairly simple Stephen King short story about a group of kids in a Midwestern town who worship a demonic entity that may or may not exist and managed to create a franchise spanning nearly 10 movies and counting. Obviously, that required a bit of an escalation from the original premise. A perfect case in point is "Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest," which follows two children (of the corn) who are adopted into foster care in Chicago.

Through a series of violent events, one of the children is able to summon the demonic corn monster to Chicago while also distributing mind-controlling corn all over the world. While the concept has about as much in common with King's original story as Clifford the Big Red Dog has in common with a chihuahua, it's a pretty great cliffhanger. A world of corn-controlled children (and adults, presumably) isn't a bad hook to hang a horror film on. Unfortunately, "Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering" would return the series to its roots, as it were, taking things back to the Midwest with a story much closer to the original "adults in a small town with spooky children" vibe.

The 1989 Tim Burton "Batman" has some of the best casting in superhero movie history. Jack Nicholson as the Joker, Michael Keaton as Batman, and although he never really had the chance to shine, Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent. Savvy comics readers knew they could expect the heroic defense attorney to turn into the villainous Two-Face in future movies. Unfortunately, while the character would appear in later "Batman" films (played memorably by Tommy Lee Jones in "Batman Forever" and Aaron Eckhart in "The Dark Knight"), Williams' version of the character would never be fully realized.

As fitting as it would be for Harvey Dent to transform into his two-faced alter ego in the second Burton "Batman" movie, it never happened. Instead, "Batman Returns" brought in Catwoman and the Penguin. Fortunately, this story has something of a happy ending: in 2017's "The LEGO Batman Movie," Williams lent his voice to the LEGO Two-Face character as an acknowledgement of the decades-long wait fans had endured.

While the "Terminator" movies have never had the cleanest of timelines (time travel tends to complicate things like that), there's a surprisingly simple throughline for each installment. "The Terminator" follows Sarah Connor and the conception of John Connor, the messianic hero of the future human resistance against our computer overlords. "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" follows John learning about his destiny, and "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" ends with him preparing to lead the resistance.

"Terminator: Salvation" serves as both prequel and sequel, showing the events in the future that led to "The Terminator" as well as what happens immediately after (again, time travel is confusing), and ends with John getting a newly mechanical heart transplant from a friendly Terminator-human hybrid. "Terminator: Genisys" completely ignored the narrative potential of the post-apocalyptic war setting by doing even more time travel, recasting everyone, and adding yet another friendly Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger (this time protecting a young Sarah Connor instead of a young John Connor).

The most significant cultural impact of the very long "Friday the 13th" film series is that it made homicidal maniac Jason Voorhees an iconic character. He's certainly intriguing and mysterious and kills with total fervor, either out of revenge or randomness. Concealing his identity behind a creepy hockey goaltender mask, Jason looms so large that it's easily forgotten that he's not the chief villain or focus of every "Friday the 13th" movie. For example, his mother avenges his death in 1980's "Friday the 13th," and he doesn't begin his killing spree until 1981's "Friday the 13th Part 2."

With its leading title and twist ending, 1985's "Friday the 13th: A New Beginning" sets up its own franchise for a soft reboot. In this, the fifth "Friday the 13th" movie, Jason's original killer, Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd), remains haunted by the murder. But a Jason imposter goes on the prowl for revenge, and when he hunts Tommy, Tommy defeats the mysterious villain and takes on the identity (and mask) of Jason Voorhees. This means that in the next movie, "Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives," Tommy-as-Jason is the central villain, right? Nope. The 1986 sequel begins with Tommy (played by a different actor, Thom Mathews), digging up Jason's corpse to burn it but accidentally resurrects him. And with that, Jason lives to kill again.

While the comedy and absurdity are much more pronounced and acknowledged in 2015's "Ant-Man" than they are in the typical Marvel Cinematic Universe entry, the film's stakes remain very high. Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), through his Pym Technologies next-generation laboratory, develops a suit that can shrink a human to a tiny size and have superpowers. After Pym is kicked out of his company by his one-time mentee Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), he recruits Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), aka Ant-Man, to stop that villain, who calls himself Yellowjacket, from figuring out the same tech and using it to carry out unfathomable acts of evil.

The whole point of "Ant-Man" then is stopping the all-important tech from getting into the wrong hands. But it does — a Hydra agent named Mitchell Carson (Martin Donovan) flees Pym Technologies with some Yellowjacket particles and runs off to parts unknown. Where does he go, and how does he use Yellowjacket particles to advance his own agenda, whatever that may be? Audiences never find out, because neither of the sequels — "Ant-Man and the Wasp" nor "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" — follow up on Carson. When confronted with this lack of plot development, "Ant-Man" director Peyton Reed explained the unresolved cliffhanger. "There was a sequence where Ant-Man has an encounter with him," he told CinemaBlend, but that scene was cut. "It felt like maybe we should leave those particles out there."

In 1999, Sony bought the rights to make movies based on the characters in the "Spider-Man" universe and produced a "Spider-Man" trilogy. After its rivals at Marvel Studios started up the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sony ramped up the output of "Spider-Man"-related movies to stay competitive, rebooting the franchise with "The Amazing Spider-Man" in 2012 and "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" in 2014. Sony has since made a couple of "Venom" films, three more "Spider-Man" movies (in cooperation with Marvel), and "Morbius," but never a project featuring the Sinister Six, a team-up of the biggest, baddest, and most famous villains from the decades-old property. Among the antagonists: Doctor Octopus, Electro, Mysterio, Sandman, Vulture, and Kraven the Hunter.

But it looked like Sony had a "Sinister Six" movie in the works around 2014 (which it later confirmed, according to Deadline) because it teased and promised its existence at the end of "The Amazing Spider-Man 2." A sequence in the film offers a quick glimpse of costume and prop elements of Sinister Six members, such as Vulture's wings and Doctor Octopus' tentacles, among other teases. While some of those villains turn up in later Spider-Man movies, starting with the MCU-based "Spider-Man: Homecoming," that "Sinister Six" movie so blatantly promised never came to fruition.

Slow, cerebral, and requiring intense concentration from audiences, "Prometheus" is a prequel to the "Alien" series of the late 20th century. Ridley Scott, who directed the initial "Alien" in 1979, helmed the 2012 movie that purported to explain and set up the events that lead to those other blockbusters. Two scientists helm a deep-space expedition to explore humanity's possible extraterrestrial origins, and like in the other "Alien" movies, there's a lot of foreboding, death, and destruction. 

"Prometheus" really parallels 1986's "Aliens" — just as that film starts with Ellen Ripley as the only human survivor after an alien assault on a spaceship, "Prometheus" winds up with optimistic, spiritual scientist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) as the only human survivor on her ship, along with an android named David. At the end of the film, Shaw and David seek out the home planet of the menacing Engineers to discover the reasons behind their drive to exterminate all humans.

A sequel to the prequel, "Alien: Covenant" hit theaters in 2017. Shaw only briefly appears as a corpse, experimented on by David (Michael Fassbender), who also destroyed the evil alien threat from the first movie. Shaw and David's interactions with the Engineers are not discussed, and so their motivations remain a mystery.

"The Matrix," the first film in the Wachowskis' sci-fi action series hit cinema screens in 1999 to widespread critical acclaim and box office success. It quickly spawned an entire franchise of additional movies, video games, and comics that continues to this day. The most important of these projects were the two sequel movies that would round out the trilogy and conclude the story of Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity in their fight against the Machines.

"The Matrix Reloaded" sees Neo, now fully aware of his powers, continuing to try and free all of humanity from the computer simulation they have been imprisoned in. The film concludes with Neo lying unconscious next to another knocked-out character called Bane, whom the villainous Smith has seemingly been able to download his personality into. Neo is effectively put into this comatose state after he was able to destroy a group of sentinels that were hunting down the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar.

This was a huge departure from what viewers had previously seen of Neo's abilities inside the Matrix. His sudden ability to use them in the real world outside of the computer simulation is a big twist that wasn't signposted. 

Since launching in 1996, the "Mission: Impossible" franchise has become one of the most successful action series of the past 30 years and has continued Tom Cruise's reign as one of the world's most bankable stars. 2011 saw the fourth entry of the franchise arrive in theaters, titled "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol." It introduced a new team of IMF agents who work with Ethan Hunt to try to clear their names after they are accused of planting a bomb in the Kremlin.

These fresh additions to the series included Jeremy Renner's intelligence analyst William Brandt, Simon Pegg's field agent Benji Dunn, and Paula Patton's agent Jane Carter. After they are successful in their mission, Hunt gets everyone together again at the end of the film and hands them another one, with the implication being that this new group will continue to work together as a new terrorist organization called The Syndicate emerges.

Unfortunately, fans never got to see any more of Carter despite the fact that other characters from the film later reappeared in subsequent releases. With little mention of her, it is unclear where she is or what might have happened to the IMF agent. Carter was seemingly set to return to the franchise, with rumors suggesting that she would have appeared in "Rogue Nation," before scheduling conflicts meant her character was cut from the film.

Okay, we've mentioned the "Terminator" movies before, but when one franchise reboots itself more than once over the span of only three movies, it tends to create some real issues for your average moviegoer. Unsurprisingly, "Terminator: Dark Fate" is no exception. Coming off the heels of 2015's "Terminator Genisys," the 2019 follow-up (which isn't even really a follow-up, but we'll get to that), took a vastly different approach. Instead of picking up where Emilia Clarke's Sarah Connor left off, they brought back an older Linda Hamilton to make a direct sequel to "Terminator 2: Judgment Day." 

We get it — "T2" is still the best "Terminator" movie by far. In fact, it's one of the greatest action movies ever made, but ignoring that huge cliffhanger at the end of "Genisys" didn't do the franchise any favors. In case you missed it, a mid-credits scene at the end of "Genisys" reveals that, although Sarah, Kyle Reese, and the T-800 nicknamed "Pops" thought they'd destroyed Skynet's central core, the rogue A.I. survives deep underground, ready for another attempt at world domination. "Dark Fate" ignores this completely, instead rebooting the franchise again with old characters, new leads, and a new A.I. deemed "Legion" that's basically the exact same thing. No wonder it didn't get a sequel either.

If there's one horror movie slasher who won't ever stay down, it's Michael Myers. The trademark antagonist of the "Halloween" franchise (sans "Halloween III: Season of the Witch"), Michael Myers has been rebooted on a number of occasions, but the most recent reboot, 2018's "Halloween," was the most impressive. Completely ignoring the 1978 film's original sequels, revivals, and the two Rob Zombie-directed reboots, David Gordon Green's slasher movie only considered the original John Carpenter film canon to its events.

Of course, this came after Zombie's "Halloween II," which concludes with Scout Taylor-Compton's Laurie Strode killing Myers (who is her brother again in this version) before exiting while wearing his mask. The film ends with Laurie in a psych ward, something that the 2018 reboot decided to move past. The more recent "Halloween" — which was admittedly better than both Zombie-directed flicks — quickly garnered two sequels, "Halloween Kills" in 2021 and "Halloween Ends" in 2022, seemingly concluding the franchise for good this time.

From 1978 until 1987, only two years before Michael Keaton's debut as Batman, Christopher Reeve as Superman was the most popular superhero on the big screen. Reeve perfectly embodied the character, which was no doubt a reason why Warner Bros. kept making "Superman" movies — that is, until "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace." Tragically, the movie plays more like an extended ad to end the Cold War, complete with a superpowered villain named Nuclear Man.

It's no surprise then that when Warner Bros. revisited the franchise with Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns" nearly two decades later, the studio decided to ignore most of the "Superman" sequels entirely. Somehow, "Superman II" is still technically canon to Brandon Routh's Man of Steel, even though it's hardly referenced. Additionally, the nuclear conflict Superman confronts during "The Quest for Peace" is abandoned entirely, making us wonder why Superman thought it was justified to leave Earth in the first place. After all, the world of "Superman Returns" is just as dangerous as ever. Though there isn't a traditional cliffhanger at the end of "Superman IV," the failure of "Returns" to acknowledge anything from the movie earns it a spot on this list.

As far as the worst unresolved cliffhangers go, the one at the end of "Spider-Man: Homecoming" is among the most egregious. After Spidey (Tom Holland) beats Adrian Toomes/The Vulture (Michael Keaton), the supervillain heads to prison, where he keeps Peter Parker's alter-ego strictly to himself. But Mac Gargan (Michael Mando), known as the Scorpion in the original Marvel Comics, arrives in jail, hoping to team up with Toomes to exact their revenge on the wall-crawler. It seems like we're about to see the beginnings of a Sinister Six, or at least a group of like-minded supervillains we haven't seen work together on screen before.

But we never get to see these guys return again on screen. The sequel, "Spider-Man: Far From Home," centers around Spidey's battles with Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), and by the time the third movie, "Spider-Man: No Way Home," came out, Vulture and Scorpion were completely forgotten. Sure, the events of "No Way Home" sent the former to Sony's Spider-Man Universe, where he encountered the titular living vampire in "Morbius," but nothing has come of that cliffhanger either.

Not every movie needs a sequel, and John Carpenter's "The Thing" certainly stands strongest on its own. The movie centers on a group of researchers in Antarctica who encounter an extra-terrestrial lifeform that can assume any shape and begins to devour everything in its path. It's just as scary as it sounds, and by the end of the movie only two characters are left alive: Kurt Russell's RJ and Keith David's Childs. The problem is that one of them is actually the creature in disguise, while the other is the last victim. Which is which is unclear, and as the film ends, we're left wondering. So when the 2011 version of "The Thing" came out, we hoped that maybe we'd finally learn what happened to our heroes. 

But the new "Thing" didn't address our concerns at all. It was instead a stealth prequel that told the story of the nearby base that the creature attacked before moving to the events seen in the 1982 original. In fact, if you watch the 2011 version first, it will lead directly into Carpenter's film. "I'd be the first to say no one should ever try to do 'Jaws' again and I certainly wouldn't want to see anyone remake 'The Exorcist,'" producer Eric Newman told The Los Angeles Times in 2010, explaining the reasoning for not remaking (or following) the original. "And we really felt the same way about 'The Thing.'" Turns out, the prequel's actually pretty good.

Another superhero franchise that failed to live up to its cliffhanger endings was the DC Extended Universe. We'd be remiss not to mention Henry Cavill's return as Superman in "Black Adam" or the lack of a true sequel to "Zack Snyder's Justice League," but since those flicks didn't get another installment, we'll have to settle for "Suicide Squad." The movie ends with a meeting between Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne and Viola Davis' Amanda Waller, as the latter provides the former with information about his future Justice Leaguers.

Although these two work together nicely, the scene ends with Waller revealing her knowledge that Bruce is Batman before Bruce tells her to shut down Task Force X before he and his "Super Friends" do it for her. Well, two versions of "Justice League" and a "Suicide Squad" sequel later, and the Justice League and Suicide Squad teams haven't even met. Despite being a recurring presence in the first film, Batman never shows up in "The Suicide Squad," and it doesn't even remotely look like Waller is shutting the program down.

There are some remakes out there that nobody has ever asked for. Possibly chief among them is Tim Burton's 2001 remake of "Planet of the Apes," and while it's actually not a terrible movie, that's not exactly enough to warrant the remake treatment. In fact, much of the basic plot is exactly the same, and though Burton does make some inspired world-building changes, it's the ending that is most memorable. As Mark Wahlberg's character returns to what he believes to be his Earth, he realizes that the apes have taken over, echoing the very end of the original.

Rather than a sequel to follow this threat further, the next "Planet of the Apes" movie turned out to be a prequel, though not to Burton's version of the story. Instead, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" began an entirely new franchise that mirrored what the original film series ultimately became: a story about the apes' slow takeover of the planet. Wahlberg's character is never mentioned (though the space mission from the original 1968 film is briefly referenced), and the story is repurposed into something new.

Not exactly the most thought-provoking action flicks, the "Underworld" movies are a lot of fun to watch if you enjoy vampire-on-werewolf violence (and who doesn't?). No exception to that rule, the fifth film, "Underworld: Blood Wars," is a return to form, attempting to recapture what made the first two entries so noteworthy. For the most part, "Blood Wars" succeeds, though there is one element they fail to capture: they forgot about the end of the fourth installment, "Underworld: Awakening," or at least they changed its outcome.

In "Underworld: Awakening," Kate Beckinsale's Selene wakes up in a world where vampires and werewolves have been exposed, she has a daughter, and her lover Michael has been captured. When the film ends, it implies that Michael escaped his imprisonment, and that Selene and their daughter Eve are to set out and find him. Except that's not what happens in the sequel. Aside from ignoring Eve until the end, "Blood Wars" retcons the "Awakening" escape as not Michael, but Marius, a deadly Lycan who killed Michael for his hybrid power. Not exactly the fifth installment we were hoping for, it's no surprise that the world of "Underworld" hasn't been revisited ever since.