Movies you didn’t know were prequels


Lots of cinemagoers love a good series of movies, from Back to the Future to Star Wars, many of us head back to the cinema year after year to keep up to date with our favorite sagas. At this stage we are used to seeing prequels and sequels; generally, they have a number after the title to give us a clue about what to expect. Toy Story 3 is a good example of this, you know what to expect from your movie experience – the third installment of Woody and Buzz’s adventures. Other movie series are more cryptic and aren’t obviously sequential, think The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, but the link to the series is often in the name.

We will be bringing you a few movies that aren’t obvious prequels, so don’t expect any ‘begins’ in the titles of these movies. Often, a film franchise will create a beginnings story if it proves to be a success at the box office and people are intrigued enough in the backstory of the characters. Other times, a movie franchise will get to the 7th or 8th movie and inevitably grow a bit stale. So, one way film studios refresh the series is to have an origins movie. Without further ado, here are some of those less obvious movie prequels.

Movies you didn’t know were prequels

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Perhaps the most famous spaghetti Western movie in the Dollars Trilogy, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ was actually the last of the three to be released but is, in fact, the prequel to the previous two. Clint Eastwood stars as the “Man with No Name” in the three films. TGTBATU is considered a prequel as it depicts the nameless man gradually acquiring the clothes we see him wear in the preceding two films.

The Scorpion King

Before we met Rick O’Connell in 1999 adventure film The Mummy, there was a whole fictional ancient Egyptian backstory we didn’t know we wanted until we got it. A focal point of the backstory is The Scorpion King, in a story set 5,000 years before The Mummy. The title character is played by The Rock, who rises up against an evil army ravaging his home. Eventually, he rises to become the feared scorpion king we see in The Mummy Returns.

Leatherface

Not obvious to anyone who hasn’t seen the horror classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Leatherface is an origins story about the iconic character from the film. Leatherface is a crazed killer who wears the skin of his victims as a mask and, from his cannibalistic family, is the main threat to hapless characters. If you aren’t familiar with the horror franchise, it may not have been apparent what you were getting into when you went to the cinema.

Movies you didn’t know were prequels

Annabelle

Annabelle is a prequel to The Conjuring horror movie series. In The Conjuring, we meet a creepy possessed doll named Annabelle, that is locked in a glass cabinet in a basement of horrors. The Conjuring introduced us to Annabelle after a demonologist couple, the Warrens (played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson), are called in to help a family in distress. The doll’s tale is very mysterious and piqued many people’s interests, sadly we didn’t get to find out too much about Annabelle in The Conjuring. Thankfully Annabelle got her own movie to explain how a porcelain doll came to be possessed by an evil spirit. Woo!

Those were some of the movie prequels you may not have noticed were indeed related to famous movies. While there are many well-known movie prequels, sometimes a few slip under the radar, thankfully we managed to bring these to your attention before they were lost to you for good.

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