Unofficial sequels are all over the place, if we stretch the guidelines. There are spiritual sequels, like how War, Inc. feels like a loose follow-up to Grosse Pointe Blank, which itself feels like an even looser follow-up to Say Anything. And there are movies with character-referencing connections, like Commando and Die Hard 2 or American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction.
But occasionally an unofficial sequel is more legitimately a continuation of another movie, only they’re not linked by a studio or much of anyone involved in the production. Not to mention any rights conflicts barring official affiliation. That’s the case with Risen, the Jesus resurrection movie that plays as, and is implicitly intended to be, a direct successor to The Passion of the Christ.
The two movies share an editor, Steven Mirkovich, but that’s as far as their union goes. He didn’t even work on the original cut of Passion, just the later PG-13 version. Sony, distributor of Risen, does highlight the association via Mirkovich in a promotional video, however. And the press notes for Risen pitch news outlets the angle of “Where The Passion of the Christ ends…”
Unofficial sequels can be definite sequels of this sort when they’re dealing with true stories — or, in the case of Risen, at least believed-to-be-true stories — or fictional works and characters who are in the public domain or allowed to be used as “homage.” Below are other such examples of movies that aren’t technically number twos but certainly carry forward a main character’s story.
Return to Oz (1985)
Is a sequel to: The Wizard of Oz (1939)
There’s actually very little reason to consider a link between MGM’s classic musical version of Frank L. Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and Disney’s flop adapted from various sequel novels. They’re simply based on the same literary franchise. But Return to Oz, the sole feature directorial effort of Walter Murch, is chronologically situated after The Wizard of Oz, so while the two movies look and feel nothing alike, they’ve long been superficially hitched. And now that Disney went and made the prequel Oz the Great and Powerful with distinct visual ties to the 1939 film, it all comes together more easily.
My Blue Heaven (1990)
Is a sequel to Goodfellas (1990)
Probably the only sequel to come out a month before its predecessor, My Blue Heaven is a veiled and exaggerated depiction of Henry Hill’s life in the Witness Protection Program, played hilariously by Steve Martin. Hill is, of course, the ex-mobster officially portrayed by Ray Liotta in Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece Goodfellas. That movie was based on the book “Wiseguy” by Nicholas Pileggi, who also wrote the screenplay and who is also the widowed husband of Nora Ephron, the screenwriter behind My Blue Heaven. She conducted interviews with Hill for her husband’s book and used many of her notes about his new life in the suburbs for her own comedy script.
Beau Travail (1999)
Is a sequel to: Le Petit Soldat (1963)
The simplest way to explain how Claire Denis’s loose adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” ties to Jean-Luc Godard’s sophomore feature is that it’s kind of fanfic as homage. But it also has the same actor, Michel Subor, playing the same character, Bruno Forestier. In the earlier film, he’s a deserter during the Algerian War tasked with a hit job for a French intelligence agency. For Denis, “I told myself that after [Godard’s film], when he leaves the army and kills the correspondent for the FLN, Forestier joined the French Foreign Legion.”
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