Failed Movie Sequels Without Their Stars

When you want to make a sequel to Predator but Arnold Schwarzenegger refuses to return, you have to turn to the obvious next best thing: Danny Glover.

If we were to choose one man from the legendary Riggs-Murtaugh team to fight badass alien manhunters, we probably wouldn't have gone with the guy who was already too old to fight crime in the first film. In an effort to mediate the lack of muscle featured in Predator 2, producers rounded out the cast with Bill Paxton and Gary Busey, two guys who could never in a million years stand up to the likes of Carl Weathers and Jessie Ventura. Bill Paxton's great, but one look from Bill Duke would make him pee his pants.

The Predator series would continue down this wimpy path, hiring wirey nerd Adrian Brody for a third sequel. Logic dictates that the next one will probably star Michael Cera.

It's a bit unfair to call Hannibal a failure. The Silence of the Lambs sequel actually made more money than the original. But it was not nearly as embraced critically, and is now looked upon as a fun b-movie while its predecessor was an Oscar-sweeping classic. Clearly, it's a step down as far as classiness goes.

You can blame that on the film's bigger focus on Hannibal Lecter himself and all of the gloriously over the top violence that goes with it. But no one can deny that the loss of Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling took a chunk out of its credibility, even when you replace her with equally classy Julianne Moore. It's a pretty fun movie, but the actor switch robs it of weight and gravitas.

The Terminator franchise survived the loss of Michael Biehn. It survived the loss of Linda Hamilton. It survived the loss of Edward Furlong. But it did not survive the loss of Arnold. It's one of the few things in the universive that died because he wasn't there.

There are actually two actor switches in Terminator Salvation. The film swaps Nick Stahl for Christian Bale and Clare Danes for Bryce Dallas Howard. That's okay because we were already used to changing John Connor, and most of us didn't even realize Danes and Howard were playing the same character.

But a Terminator film needs a beef-bot, and the best this film could muster up was a confused Sam Worthington. It must have been obvious that something was lacking because they threw an ugly CG version of young Arnold into the finale. Too little, too late.

It's a long-standing Hollywood axiom that you do not replace Patrick Swayze. And if you do, you better at least replace him with his brother, Don. The producers of Road House 2 failed to heed both warnings.

The original Road House is one of the greatest stupid-but-fun movies of all time. To replace someone like Patrick Swayze with the likes of Jonathan Schaech has to be one of the worst ideas ever, whether Schaech is playing Swayze's son or not. This direct-to-video film was never going to be that great, but without Swayze there's little reason for it to exist at all.