Given its long history both in Hollywood and elsewhere, it is surprising that such a prevalent and central presence in commercial cinema as the sequel has been so perpetually overlooked. This is not to say that the films themselves have been ignored - as the voluminous material on Aliens (James Cameron, 1986) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991), as well as The Matrix (Andy and Lana Wachowski, 1999-2003) and The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003) trilogies attests - but the bulk of this criticism takes little interest in their status as sequels, choosing instead to focus on their place within a director's body of work, their representations of gender and so on.

In the 1990s the sequel became more visible in relation to debates around what constituted the 'new' or 'post-classical' Hollywood, with scholars such as Thomas Schatz ('The New Hollywood' in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, Routledge, 1993) and Timothy Corrigan (A Cinema Without Walls, Rutgers University Press, 1991) invoking the form as symptomatic of shifts within that industry. In this respect, academics have been in step with popular criticism of the sequel, which has been widespread and persistent since the late 1970s and has manifested itself in writings by Vincent Canby (1977), Peter Rainer (1983), Richard Corliss (1990, 1992) and J. Hoberman, whose oft-quoted review of Hollywood from 1975 to 1985 decried the bout of 'sequelitis' (1985:38) that had apparently afflicted that decade.