Action Sequels of 1989 Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)
The summer of 1989 was the most concentrated season of franchise sequels in Hollywood history to that point. Lethal Weapon 2 opened on July 7 into a calendar that included Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (May 24), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (June 9), Ghostbusters II (June 16), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (June 23), Batman (June 23), License to Kill (July 14), The Karate Kid Part III (June 30), and Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (July 28). Of the top ten domestic grossers that year, eight were sequels or franchise installments. LW2 finished sixth.
The 1989 sequel-summer template
Studios had spent the second half of the 1980s converting hit originals into franchise IP. Indiana Jones (1981, 1984), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Lethal Weapon (1987), Die Hard (1988), Predator (1987), Aliens (1986) had all generated sequels by 1989 or had sequels in production. The economics were straightforward: a known property with returning stars opened wide on lower marketing costs, and the secondary windows (cable, home video, foreign) had become large enough that even modest theatrical returns produced profit.
"By 1989, the studios had figured out the math. A Lethal Weapon 2 opens wider, costs less to market, and books faster on cable than a new property with the same talent. Action sequels stopped being a way to extend a franchise and became a way to operate one." — Peter Bart, Variety editor's column (1989, archived)
The downside was that most sequels were straightforward repeats. The Karate Kid Part III re-staged the Karate Kid arc with diminishing emotional return. Star Trek V was the franchise's lowest-grossing installment to that point. Ghostbusters II was a pale copy of the original. Friday the 13th Part VIII was a slasher franchise running on fumes.
Where LW2 sat
LW2 was widely considered, at the time and since, the best of the action sequels of that summer. Reviewers praised it for solving the structural problem most action sequels did not solve.
"Of all the sequels released this summer, Lethal Weapon 2 is the one that justifies its existence on its own terms. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the only competition, and it is competition. The two films are operating at the highest level of franchise cinema." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1989)
The structural argument LW2 made — re-disclose the first film's wound at the midpoint as a contract murder by the new antagonists — is structurally distinct from anything else in the 1989 sequel summer. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade solved the structural problem by introducing Sean Connery as Indy's father, expanding the family rather than reattributing trauma. Batman (1989) was a reboot rather than a sequel, and the structural problem did not apply. License to Kill (1989) re-staged the Bond formula with personal stakes (the Felix Leiter mauling) but did not reattribute the franchise's existing emotional history.
The 1989 sequels that did not work
Several 1989 sequels demonstrated the cost of running the franchise without solving its structural problem.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier attempted a thematic-introspection arc (Spock's half-brother) without the writing or the budget to support it. The film grossed $63 million domestic against a $33 million budget — profitable, but well below Star Trek IV (1986) and below studio expectations.
Ghostbusters II re-staged the Ghostbusters (1984) formula with a less-coherent antagonist (the river of slime, Vigo the Carpathian) and weaker character beats. It grossed $112 million domestic — below Sony's expectations — and effectively ended the original cast's franchise.
The Karate Kid Part III was the third Daniel-LaRusso-vs-Cobra-Kai film in five years and grossed $39 million domestic, less than half of Part II. The franchise paused until The Next Karate Kid (1994) attempted a reboot.
In each case, the sequel ran the formula without solving the question of why a sequel was justified. The original arc had resolved; the second installment had nothing structurally new to say about the protagonist; the audience felt the diminishing return.
What LW2's success did
LW2's commercial outperformance ($227 million worldwide, more than double LW1) confirmed that an action sequel could be made structurally meaningful without abandoning the original's appeal. The lesson the studios drew, however, was the more cynical one: an action sequel could open big regardless of structural quality. Lethal Weapon 3 (1992) and Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) reverted to the more standard "new case, same partnership" template; both films grossed more than LW2 worldwide but neither attempted the midpoint-reattribution move.
The structural lesson — that a sequel can extend rather than repeat the original by re-disclosing the original's wound — was not widely applied. Almost no subsequent major action sequel attempted the midpoint-reattribution structure LW2 used.
"LW2 was a structural experiment that worked, and almost no one tried it again. The studios learned the wrong lesson. They learned that audiences will show up for any sequel; they did not learn that the LW2 audience showed up and was satisfied because the film had earned its sequel status structurally." — Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle retrospective (2018)
The longer 1980s context
LW2 sits at the end of a particular moment in American action cinema — the late 1980s peak of the buddy-cop sequel — and at the start of another. The 1990s would deliver Die Hard 2 (1990), Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), Beverly Hills Cop III (1994), Bad Boys II (2003), and the Bad Boys franchise template, all of which inherited LW2's tonal register without adopting its structural ambition. The buddy-cop sequel as a genre owes much of its texture to LW2; its formal innovation, less so.