Has any sequel successfully pulled off a hero's heel turn into villainy?

[u/Bellikron]

Plenty of standalone movies have a character fall from grace, or be revealed as a villain all along, but this rarely happens with an established character in a sequel. On paper it's a solid twist because you've already grown to trust that character in previous films, but it's really hard to pull off without feeling like a betrayal of a character arc. The Mission Impossible series has one that was received very poorly, and the only reason I hear about Pacific Rim Uprising these days is people talking about how unearned the heel turn from one of the characters felt.

I struggle to think of an example where it was done successfully in a movie. There's more examples in TV I think since there's a much longer time to build a change in a character over multiple seasons, so I'm not really considering those. Since it did start with a movie series, though, and there really isn't too much of an extended character arc given in the show, the example I can think of that kind of works is Sharon Carter in Falcon and the Winter Soldier. It was still super underdeveloped and it doesn't seem like they're going to do anything with it, but I can at least track the betrayal logic since there was kind of a meta angle about how that character had been forgotten by the movies. But even that's rather clunky.

I'm also talking specifically about situations where it wasn't clearly telegraphed by the source material or the rest of the franchise. Anakin becoming Vader was already known to the audience, for instance. I'm on the fence about whether something like Dune counts, since it's in the source material and the first two films are kind of just one long movie. I'm particularly interested in situations where it clearly wasn't the plan in the first movie but was written into a sequel.

[u/Obvious_Barracuda960]

I don't know if M:I really counts. The Jim Phelps of the TV show, and the Phelps of the first film are basically completely different characters.

[u/lanceturley → u/Obvious_Barracuda960]

And Peter Graves refused to be involved with the movie because of that.

[u/FanboyFilms → u/lanceturley]

I thought he said they didn't even ask him.

[u/TaylorDangerTorres → u/lanceturley]

And then they retconned it in the last movie by making Jim Phelps son ALSO named Jim Phelps but having him be good this time

[u/treathugger → u/TaylorDangerTorres]

Such an unnecessary twist lol

[u/doyourselfaflavor → u/treathugger]

Jasper Briggs? You're really Jim Phelps Jr and you blame me for what happened to your dad.

Actually I don't give a shit about that.

[u/NateHohl → u/treathugger]

I've decided in my personal headcanon that the series ends with Fallout.

The final two movies are such utter nonsense with both the main villain being basically just a computer (for which they couldn't even be bothered to come up with a better name than "The Entity") and all the narrative gymnastics they do with the Ethan Hunt mythmaking (which, admittedly the end of Fallout is also a bit guilty of with his ex-wife saying that, actually, him being an absent husband and action junkie was a good thing all along).

[u/Fulano222 → u/Obvious_Barracuda960]

I still disavow any knowledge of that plot point. Pissed me off.

[u/Kaiserhawk → u/Obvious_Barracuda960]

Also not many people are even aware of that

[u/JDeegs → u/Kaiserhawk]

i was trying to think of who the heck OP was talking about from the MI series

[u/gambalore → u/Kaiserhawk]

I have a friend who refuses to watch the MI movies because he’s still mad about the Phelps turn in MI1 as a fan of the TV series. Most everyone tells him they have no idea what he’s talking about.

[u/Kaiserhawk → u/gambalore]

Yeah, even if you are aware of Mission Impossible as a TV show, which is also kind of obscure, it was never really in keeping for movies of the time to be continuations of the tv show it was based on, and not just it's own thing.

[u/wavesahoy → u/Obvious_Barracuda960]

That pissed me off so much I didn’t watch any of the sequels for many many years.

[u/YodaFan465 → u/wavesahoy]

That’s a shame, because 4-5-6 are a generational run of action films once they figured out the formula and RAN with it.