'Jack Reacher' and other sequels nobody asked for

There is this curious phenomenon these days in Hollywood. We often have legitimate franchises that are pre-established as such -- think Star Wars or Marvel. There are genuinely original hits or sagas that lend themselves naturally to a sequel. And then there are films that were never that popular to begin with, that somehow spawn follow ups.

We've already been treated this year to another Bridget Jones movie. Why? Another Neighbors. Was there more story to tell? And now we're getting a second installment of Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, which I also don't think anyone was particularly clamoring for.

I actually quite enjoy most Tom Cruise movies, particularly his Mission: Impossible films, which for me are just a notch below the James Bond series in terms of their use of exotic locales and death defying practical stunts. But Jack Reacher always felt like the wrong role for him.

It's the kind of part that screams for a Chris Hemsworth or maybe even Jason Statham (who has his own inexplicable sequel issue of his own), someone who is believable as a physically imposing bad ass. At age 54 and at barely over 5 feet tall, Cruise just doesn't seem credible to me as a punch first, ask questions later kind of guy.

And the original film's decent but not overwhelming roughly $80 million gross at the box office didn't seem to suggest that audiences desperately wanted more. Perhaps Cruise did?

There are sometimes contractual sequels that studios can't quite escape from -- that explains in part why we got a Basic Instinct sequel, that wasn't really necessary to begin with, about 14 years too late. The studio was forced to either make the film and hope it made a profit, or pay off star Sharon Stone for a deal that was struck in the afterglow of the first movie.

I get it, some of these sequels seem like a good idea at the time. I loved Zoolander, and would have loved to see more of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson's antics. I saw Zoolander 2, in theaters, and was it the abomination many critics thought it was? No. But it also felt totally useless, and not in an amusing way.

And I can't for the life of me understand why anyone thought we needed a Blues Brothers film without John Belushi. That's just blasphemous.

This shouldn't really be a big deal -- after all, Hollywood is a for profit business, so why wouldn't they try to hedge their bets with a 'property' that already has a potentially built-in audience and name recognition. But what's super problematic about movies like this is they suck oxygen and funds away from more original content that might otherwise have broken through.

Take Southside With You for instance. This well-reviewed romantic film about the Obamas' first date deserved to be a hit, albeit a small boutique one. Yet it bombed on its opening weekend, in part because of potential political bias, but also because it was opening opposite a totally pointless reboot of Ben-Hur and something called Mechanic: Resurrection.

And Southside With You is just one of several excellent films this year that never really earned mainstream appreciation because they got swamped by sequel-itis.

I miss the good old days when, if your film got a sequel, you really earned it and it felt like a natural extension of the original's story. Not everything, however, has an arc. And some films are just better left alone as one-offs.