The film industry was built on the backs of innovators and creatives, people that wanted to create something new and fresh for audiences. In recent years this industry has become a plague of cash-grab sequels to movies that came out nearly a decade ago or longer. Unsurprisingly the most notorious contributor to this problem are the recent films released by Disney Studios.

One of the most infamous sequels that was released in recent years, which has almost all of the key characteristics of a bad sequel, is “Incredibles 2” (2018). The original film, “The Incredibles,” was released in June of 2004. This means there was a 14-year gap between the releases of the original and that of the sequel. A long gap of time between iterations in the series is the biggest sign of a bad sequel. If there was a need for a second part to a film upon creating the first one, it would have been produced, or at least announced, within a couple years of the release of the first movie. Along with its other characteristics of focusing on a plot extremely similar to that of the original, rehashing already established character motivations, and predictable plot twists, “Incredibles 2” is a decent movie but an awful sequel and a perfect benchmark for where Disney has gone to with its films.

Within the last six years, after the release of “Incredibles 2,” Disney has released 37 movies that qualify as a sequel, remake, or a part of an already established extended universe, like Marvel Studios movies. This is startling when you compare it to the 86 films they’ve put out overall. That’s 43 percent being taken up by sequels, live-action remakes, or “Marvel” movies.

Disney has been releasing sequels for beloved films since well before 2018 but it’s after that point that Disney began to cling to them seemingly as their main source of profit from their films. Once the 11-year-long Marvel storyline was beginning to wrap up with its two final movies, “Avengers: Infinity War” (2017) and “Avengers: Endgame” (2019), Disney was looking for their new cash flow, and sequels had done them well before. This is especially true after the COVID-19 pandemic began and Disney started to directly release their feature films onto their streaming service, Disney+. One of their first major feature-length films to test this new format was the standalone movie, “Onward” (2020).

“Onward” was released just a couple weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down theaters worldwide in March of 2020, which heavily impacted its box-office earnings and caused it to lose somewhere between $33 and $58 million due to its high budget of between $175 - $200 million. This trend of disappointments for Disney continued with each additional original film released straight to streaming during the pandemic. “Soul” (2020) and “Luca” (2021) had been in development before the pandemic, but largely due to the lack of ticket sales from theater releases, and their large budgets, both of these films either barely broke even or lost the studio money.

These films were dubbed “box office failures” not because of a lack of audience interest, but because they had little to no theatrical release and the marketing that comes with it. “Soul” holds an 88 percent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 3.9 out of five rating on the popular movie review site “Letterboxd.” Similarly “Luca” has an 84 percent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 3.7 out of five rating on “Letterboxd.” If either of these films had been given the chance of a full theatrical release and done as well as these ratings suggest, maybe Disney would not give up on original films with fresh ideas and memorable characters. Instead, Disney continues to put out more sequels.

The sequels and remakes they have released in the last six years have made them billions of dollars, betting on the assumption that audiences want a new installment of their favorite film. Disney gets the money without all the effort of coming out with something bold and exciting. They found this to happen with their remakes of “Aladdin” (2019), “Dumbo” (2019), “Mulan” (2020) “The Lion King” (2019), and “The Little Mermaid” (2023).

Out of the 37 sequels that Disney put out in the last six years they average a “Letterboxd” rating of 2.8, the lowest being the live-action “Pinocchio” (2022) at 1.9 out of five and the highest “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” (2023) at a 4.0 with “Avengers: Endgame” shortly behind at a 3.9. None of the live-action remakes have earned a rating above the 3.5 earned by “Christopher Robin” (2018).

While I am sure Disney will not stop coming out with more sequels in the coming years, I will wait for audiences to start to get tired of them in the hope for the gem of a standalone film to be released.