My friends and I have been arguing this, and I was wondering if you could shed some light on the subject:
The movie “Teen Wolf Too” is considered by many to be the sequel to “Teen Wolf,” however it stars a different actor who plays a different character (The original Teen Wolf’s cousin, if I’m not mistaken) and a totally different setting with only one character from the previous movie. Although they are both directed by the same person, is the theme of simply being a teen wolf sufficient to consider the second movie a sequel? Don’t sequels usually imply a continuation of plot or story from the previous movie?
ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: According to the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, “sequel” can mean “subsequent development” or “the next installment (as of a speech or story); especially : a literary, cinematic, or televised work continuing the course of a story begun in a preceding one.” If you’re a stickler, then perhaps you shouldn’t count it as a sequel since you’re correct that it does imply continuation (or vice versa, in the case of Star Wars and many other movies). It’s more like the Andy Hardy, Charlie Chan, or Thin Man movies: each subsequent one isn’t a sequel, it’s just another in the series. You can cry “foul!”
But, is such a crummy movie really worth crying foul about? Aren’t there other reasons to trash it? It seems to me to be close enough “the next installment” of the Teen Wolf franchise to fit the definition, certainly in the minds of the producers who hoped to make a few bucks off of a really cheap film that attempted to cash in on the popularity of Michael J. Fox in the earlier one. The consensus of citizen-reviewers at imdb.com seems to be that it’s a sequel.