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When I first saw “Gladiator II” in theaters two years ago, the film it most reminded me of was not the first “Gladiator,” or “Ben-Hur,” or any other sword-and-sandals epic for that matter. Instead, as IndieWire’s own Alison Foreman and I left the bizarrely hot Alamo Drafthouse Theater discussing the decades-later sequel, which cast Paul Mescal as the son of Russell Crowe’s original enslaved Roman warrior fighting a battle eerily similar to the one his father fought 25 years ago, the movie I immediately brought up as a comparison was “The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea.”
Released in the year 2000, 11 years after the original “Little Mermaid” pushed Disney into its celebrated ’90s renaissance period, “Return to the Sea” is a direct-to-video sequel about what would happen if Ariel grew up and had a daughter who went through a more or less identical emotional journey as her. Some of the particulars are swapped out (it rests on the role-reversal of Ariel’s child Melody being raised as a human who wants to explore the sea instead of a mermaid who yearns for land), but “Return to the Sea” isn’t so much an evolution or expansion on the colorful undersea world Disney created in the original movie as it is an attempt to encase it in amber.
As Ariel did before her, Melody chafes against overbearing, protective parents who disapprove of her thirst for adventure, and gets manipulated by a sadistic sea witch — Morgana, or “Ursula’s crazy sister,” as Sebastian clumsily explains to the audience in the prologue (she’s also voiced by Pat Carroll, to boot). The journey to the sea largely sees Melody enter a mermaid kingdom that hasn’t moved on or grown in the decade since the events of the original. Flounder got older and had kids, but everyone else is where they were when Ariel — who distressingly still looks like a 15-year-old as a grown mother — left them. If the intended result is to chase the magic of the original — albeit with inferior songs and a noticeably shaky animation budget — the results feel more depressing than nostalgic, an attempt to puppet a dead fish back to life when it really should just be tossed into the garbage.
I never watched “Return to the Sea” as a child, only throwing it once during the height of COVID via Disney+, where all of the House of Mouse’s worst and most embarrassing projects go to languish, so I didn’t have the nostalgia necessary to see the sequel as anything but amateurish. And as I watched “Gladiator II,” which, like “Return to the Sea,” follows the child of the original main character in a story that largely follows the same basic beats of the original, all I could think of was how this $200 million blockbuster and Oscar hopeful felt about as cheap and small as a direct-to-DVD children’s movie.
That feeling, that a big-screen sequel feels like it belongs on the racks of my dearly departed Oyster Bay, New York Blockbuster location, is something that’s become all too prevalent in recent years as franchise IP has been endlessly mined by corporations. For as disposable as the Disney direct-to-video sequel factory felt at the time, standards have slipped to the extent that modern sequels feel like they can belong to that world.
“Return to the Sea” was a part of a veritable empire of quickly made, haphazardly handled direct-to-VHS or DVD films produced by Disney over a roughly 20-year period, from 1994 with the release of “Aladdin” sequel “The Return of Jafar” to 2014, when the release of a final film in a “Tinker Bell” animated movie franchise hit bargain bin shelves. Largely produced by DisneyToon Studios, which shuttered in 2018, in conjunction with Walt Disney Television Animation, with animation work outsourced to foreign teams in Japan and Australia, these movies often barely kept up any pretense of artistic integrity, more a Christmas stocking stuffer with some recognizable characters slapped onto the front cover than meaningful or thoughtful projects in and of themselves.
The resources provided to the teams responsible for the movies were extraordinarily low: “The Return of Jafar” was made on a $3.5 million budget compared to the original’s $28 million, and as the first effort from the studio, that film’s animation is on the more polished end when you look at some of the projects that came after its success. Generally clocking in at runtimes under 90 minutes, sometimes barely even hitting a full hour, the stories were generally lazy, forced rehashes of the conflicts of the originals.
These films came in a few different permutations. There were the actual, proper sequels starring the main characters of the original films (“The Return of Jafar,” “Mulan II,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame II.”) Then there were the films that took the “Return to the Sea” approach and followed the kids of the original characters: “The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride” stars Simba’s daughter Kiara in a relationship drama with the uncomfortably sexy Kovu in a spin on “Romeo and Juliet” where the original aped “Hamlet,” while “Lady and the Tramp II” focused on the dogs’ puppy Scramp as he runs away from home and falls in love with a stray.
For films like “Beauty and the Beast” or “Bambi II” that ended with a major status quo change that would require some creativity to meaningfully explore, Disney created “midquels” set around the events of the original: “Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas” is set within a montage from the first film mostly so all of the castle staff can retain their memorable (and marketable) cursed forms, while “Bambi II” is set between the traumatic death of Bambi’s mother in the original and the time jump to the deer as a young adult. Most exceptionally lazy were the films that very obviously stitched together three episodes of a shelved TV spinoff through a haphazard framing device, a fate which befell franchises like “Beauty and the Beast” (“Belle’s Magical World,”), “Cinderella” (“Dreams Come True”), “Tarzan” (“Tarzan & Jane”), and “Atlantis” (“Atlantis: Milo’s Return”).
I’m not going to pretend that I was a discerning enough child not to love a few of these movies growing up. “The Lion King 1/2,” a retelling of the iconic animal epic from the perspective of comedic relief Timon and Pumba, was probably the funniest film of all time to me when I was 7 years old. I remember watching “The Fox and the Hound 2” — a midquel set between the act break of the infamously dark and depressing original where Cooper joins a traveling circus of singing dogs — an unhealthy amount of times growing up. A few, revisited today, have some redeeming qualities: “Cinderella III: A Twist in Time” is an unexpectedly charming and nifty adventure film that succeeds by taking a looser, more comedic approach than the rather stately original 1950 animated classic.
But what rare gems can be found within this physical media dust heap are vastly, vastly outweighed by the sheer number of badly animated, poorly conceived movies hastily made by DisneyToon to meet deadlines. Many are just boring, but a few are outright insulting towards anyone who loved the originals: “Mulan II” and the “Beauty and the Beast” films make the romances that fueled the original Disney Renaissance films come across as worryingly toxic, while the painfully bad “Hunchback of Notre Dame II” forgoes the self-acceptance arc that drove the original film in favor of pairing Quasimodo with a generic new love interest. But even the okay ones have a stale stench to them that makes revisits more depressing than nostalgic; rather than expanding our understanding of the original works, these sequels make the animated films feel so much smaller and duller.
After producing direct-to-VHS and DVD sequel and spinoff films throughout the ’90s and 2000s, DisneyToon output slowed down in 2006, upon John Lasseter joining Disney after the Pixar acquisition and promotion to chief creative officer of the corporation’s animation studios. Reports at the time alleged Lasseter disliked the sequel films as devaluations of the animated classics they were based on, and after the release of “The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning” in 2008, production on these films largely stopped outside of the “Tinker Bell” films, which had vanishingly little to do with the original “Peter Pan.”
A time when Disney cared about quality control feels slightly surreal nowadays, looking at what the company has evolved into over the past 20 years since the direct-to-DVD era died down. As much as the sequels may have seemed like they were crowding the market at the time, confining them to the world of home video and outside of theaters is downright restrained compared to the company’s modern practices, with the glut of ugly live-action remakes that make the cheap animation of these films look downright artistically inspired. Many of these films — from the “Mufasa: The Lion King” prequel to the one “Christopher Robin” movie with disturbing CGI stuffed animals — would’ve and should’ve been direct-to-video years ago.
That’s not even mentioning the House of Mouse’s attempts at sequels, which often have the cheap, slapdash feel of a Disney VHS release despite being major blockbusters. “Moana 2” in particular is a film that quite literally would have been released direct-to-video had it come out in the 2000s; the film began as a Disney+ show before getting retrofitted into a theatrical film, with the seams between episodic installments in the adventures of Moana and her friends proving as readily obvious as they did in “Belle’s Magical World.” Outside of the animated world, this year saw Disney release “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” a “Star Wars” film that looked and felt like three or four episodes of a show stitched together.
It’s not just Disney animated movies that have been feeling increasingly lacking in imagination for how to follow-up upon beloved original properties. It’s been customary in film circles to bemoan the rise of legacy sequels, movies that follow a new generation of characters in the same world of a once prominent franchise, with original characters back mostly for nostalgia and vibes. “Gladiator II” is an obvious example, as are the recent “Ghostbusters” films which follow the kids of the original “Ghostbusters” but bring back the original cast mostly for cameos and to parade around like action figures for fans to applaud for. Some of these films occasionally work, but the fundamental problem with many legacy sequels is how safe they are, content to circle the drain and indulge in nostalgia instead of pushing these properties anywhere new.
You could argue “The Color of Money” was the first legacy sequel if you want (it’s also one of the best), but some of the first that I or people of my generation encountered were the strand of Disney direct-to-VHS sequels about the kids of the original characters. “Return to the Sea” is effectively a legacy sequel that casts the original characters as supporting parts in the story of Ariel’s annoying daughter, while “The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride” accomplishes something similar. Even the films that aren’t explicitly about the next generation often have a stasis-like quality to them, refusing to take risks or stray from the original films in any daring way, that feels apiece with where modern franchise filmmaking is in 2026.
Nowadays, you could easily imagine movies “Return to the Sea” and “Return of Jafar,” with some minor polish towards their visuals, making it into actual movie theaters rather than getting pushed out into video stores. That says less about their quality or how well they hold up today for anyone lacking in nostalgia goggles than it does about where Hollywood and the film industry is in 2026, where standards of craft and ingenuity have felt like constantly slipping benchmarks modern corporations don’t even really try to reach. The death of the physical media market has been a tragedy for many reasons. But there’s something to be said about a time where movies like these were treated as the second-hands they were.
