5 Movie Sequels That Actually Ruined Famous Characters

In both Kingsman: The Golden Circle and Men In Black II, the mentors (and the very bankable actors playing them) return from death/retirement. Hooray, we liked those guys! Except that bringing them back ruins the character arcs for the guys we're actually supposed to root for. Instead of growing into capable badasses, the main characters get booted back to new guy status, sidekicks running to their hero-daddies to get them out of trouble.

By the end of Men In Black, Agent J was no longer a rookie agent. He had his own suit and shades (a big deal in the MIB universe), but most importantly, he now had a rookie partner of his own to show the ropes. But in MIB2, J no longer has any of these, and the whole story revolves around him running back to Tommy Lee Jones to get him out of a galactic pickle. The same happens to Eggsy in Kingsman 2. He's supposed to have become a full agent and bona fide world-saver, yet he still needs his formerly deceased mentor Harry (a guy who had most of his frontal lobe blown out), to come back and solve the mystery for him.

This also ruins the mentors themselves, completely undercutting the emotional impact of their departures. Kingsman: The Golden Circle even has the gall to pull this stunt twice, killing off new mentor Merlin solely to make room for Harry again. Nice try, movie, but you've by now established that A) getting shot in the head does nothing, and B) nothing in the universe matters at all. So instead of feeling anything about the death of an important character, we'll wait until Kingsman 3, when the writers stitch him back together, Frankenstein-style.

But in the sequel, when Leatherface encounters the movie's heroine, Vanita "Stretch" Brock, he turns into some idiot horny teenager...

Instead of doing what comes naturally -- i.e. sawing her in half -- Leatherface drags her to his room, King Kong-style, whereupon she is able to seduce him into murdering his family. You know, the one thing he is supposed to care about most. In the end, Leatherface chainsaw-massacres not only what he holds dear, but also every tie between this shitty sequel and the original classic.

When we see RoboCop again in the sequel, he's less autonomous and more "robotic" than at any point in the first film. When his fellow officers go on strike, he is literally unable to join them in solidarity because his programming won't allow it. The movie also asserts that his last human feature, his face, has in fact been a synthetic copy of what he used to look like all along. Hell, at one point, he even says he's not Murphy, undoing the entire thematic arc of the first film.

But maybe the weirdest thing that screws with the original movie is how they retcon Murphy's true inner strength from being his love and humanity to him ... being a Catholic? When the executives of the franchise's sorta-evil corporation are puzzled as to why they can't make any more functional RoboCops, its new rising star explains that Murphy was uniquely suited to be an all-powerful killing machine because of his "moral fiber" as a "devout Irish Catholic." When other, non-Catholic cops are forcibly introduced to the program, they immediately commit suicide. They evidently cannot handle the immense stress of becoming a robot cop, primarily because they haven't said enough Hail Marys or eaten enough fish on Fridays.

Eventually, they do find another strain of humanity perfect for their cyborg program: death row inmates. The idea being that a criminal's motivation for power would be enough to help them through the process. So there are only two types of people perfectly suited to become immortal machine gods: Catholics and bloodthirsty criminals. Hmm, how to choose?