10 Major Movie Characters Given Nothing To Do In The Sequel

Sequels to hit movies are so incredibly tough to pull off, as filmmakers need to try and match if not exceed the quality of the predecessor while sufficiently expanding the scope and juggling a growing cast of characters.

As such it's little surprise that so many sequels end up failing characters from the first film, effectively giving them nothing to do but flounder around in the periphery waiting for their cue.

And that's absolutely what happened with these 10 characters. Inspired by a recent Reddit thread on the subject, these 10 characters were all introduced as significant fixtures in one movie, only to be relegated to unimportant supporting player status in a sequel.

While not all sequels can find space for all original characters - and often that's definitely not the way to go - the fact that these beloved characters were left with so little to do suggests they could've probably been cut out entirely.

In some cases the next movie rectified the situation and gave the characters their fair due, but others made them so irrelevant that there was sadly no going back...

James Marsden was quite perfectly cast as Cyclops in the original X-Men, and though the first film didn't give the character a terrific showing, there was clearly room for growth in the sequels.

But in X2, he gets captured early on, disappears for a huge chunk of the movie, and only returns for a few minutes near the end of the film while mind-controlled no less.

Yet he got done the dirtiest of all in the third X-Men, The Last Stand, where he's unceremoniously killed off by Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) and... that's that.

Ultimately Cyclops was underserved in favour of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Jean Grey throughout the trilogy, but given that he's one of the most popular X-Men, it's totally bizarre how quickly he became a second-rate also-ran superhero.

That said, Marsden has recently expressed his willingness to reprise the role in a future film, and with Deadpool 3 rumoured to feature numerous characters from Fox's X-Men movies, we can only hope that he gets his wish.