5 Film Sequels and Reboots We Didn't Need In 2018

At this point, it's safe to say that Hollywood doesn't know what it's talking about the majority of the time. Otherwise, how could it explain the five (!) Step Up movies or The Fast and the Furious franchise? Or, I don't now, the countless sequels, prequels, and reboots of movies and TV shows that should have been left alone?

Throughout 2018, unfortunately, Hollywood fed us way too many recycled ideas. At best, these half-assed attempts to try and make a quick buck off a franchise's prior successes taint the original's legacy. At worst, they straight up ruin your childhood. Wherever the following movies land on this spectrum, we're certainly better off without them. If this holiday season your parents or your nieces and nephews suggest any of the following for movie nights, we suggest make up an excuse and leave. Fast.

Tom Cruise recovers a stolen object to stop a terrorist organization from doing something very, very bad, gets involved in a car chase, and survives an explosion? How groundbreaking. It's clear that at this point in the Mission Impossible franchise, the writers are no longer coming up with anything truly unpredictable. And that's fine! It's perfectly understandable to eventually find yourself unable to impress viewers with the same, old formula. The hero we need no longer looks like a shorter-than-average white man who has had the same hairstyle for like a decade. Tom, please retire.

To be clear, we still need way more movies with a female-majority cast. We still need all kinds of women in all kinds of roles. But we did not need to rely on the Ocean’s franchise. This version is basically the same kind of film as the other handful of Ocean's films, which upsets me to no end because it could have been a kick-ass action movie that we deserve. It did well on the box office, but it's a shame that what could have been a historic movie turned out to be another disposable, forgettable "blockbuster."

Hollywood didn't care that we just had a Jungle Book reboot two years ago. Nope! It didn't care that this one is nearly identical to the last. It's like when pop singers release a deluxe version of their album with one new song thrown in. What's the point? Maybe the film was meant to be a departure from Disney’s adaptation of the classic tale, but the result is just an overly dark and half-baked iteration that arrived way too soon after Disney’s 2016 reboot.

Racking in an abysmal 33 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, The Predator is a tired iteration of the previous three films that the franchise has churned out. Even more disappointing than the unnecessarily loud, hollow action that seems to consume every second of screen time is the movie’s treatment of characters with disabilities. Pass.

I'm convinced that this film was written by a 7 year old. The countless action scenes were actually impressive, but not even those, and Jeff Goldblum, could save this from its absurd plot. I appreciate Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom for paying homage to the original Jurassic Park in several parts in the movie including the opening scene, but overall it's nothing more than a high-budget ripoff of its far superior predecessor.