10 Hollywood stars who walked away from huge movie sequels – did they make the right call?

Given movie sequels all too frequently fail to hit the creative or commercial heights of their predecessors – sometimes being slung together, or rehashing an original beat for beat – it’s no surprise when a star simply refuses to sign up. But what risks do they take by doing so?

From tanking the films to missing out on the opportunity for big bucks and more critical acclaim, it really could go either way. So we've taken a look at the most memorable examples of an actor deciding against returning, why they walked away, and how that worked out for everyone involved.

1. Richard Dreyfuss – Jaws 2 (1978)

Taking nearly $500 million at the box office in 1975, Jaws basically invented the summer blockbuster, with its high-concept premise and status as an impossibly exciting cinematic event. Understandably, Universal was keen to do a sequel immediately but, as Spielberg told Entertainment Weekly in 2011, his horrible time filming at sea meant he was "done with the ocean".

Leading man Roy Scheider signed on regardless, but his character’s right-hand man, and source of so much of the original’s charm, Richard Dreyfuss, did not. In 2014, Dreyfuss told The Hollywood Reporter that he didn’t make Jaws 2 because Spielberg wasn’t attached, saying, "I knew what made Jaws good," adding that his dissatisfaction with his fee on the original contributed to his decision to turn down the sequel. "You would be embarrassed at how much they paid us," he griped.

Although Jaws 2 was a nightmare to make and expensive to produce, it was a box office hit, eventually raking in more than $200 million. However, reviewers this time were less than impressed, with Roger Ebert describing it as "pure trash". It’s doubtful that Dreyfuss regretted his decision to duck out, as him and Spielberg had instead reunited for 1977’s phenomenally successful, critically acclaimed Close Encounters, while a year later the actor would pick up the Academy Award for best actor for his performance in The Goodbye Girl.

2. Marlon Brando – The Godfather Part II (1974)

Marlon Brando’s iconic performance in 1972’s The Godfather won the titanic and famously troublesome thespian his second best actor Oscar. Given that his character – crime boss Vito Corleone – died in the first film, his return for the 1974 sequel wasn’t exactly expected, with Robert De Niro onboard to portray the younger Vito.

However, the original plan was that Brando would return for a single scene, a 1940s flashback featuring Vito surrounded by his family. As producer Fred Roos describes in Peter Cowie’s The Godfather Book, negotiations were difficult, because Brando had unresolved issues with Paramount regarding the deal he was forced to take on the first film.

The actor’s salary demands this time round were characteristically wild – a Daily Variety news item from the time reported that he had requested "$500,000 plus 10 per cent of the gross". In the end, Brando was a no-show, with Coppola telling the LA Times in 1974 that the actor, "just doesn’t like to work". The scene was ultimately rewritten to tailor it toward the returning James Caan.

The triumphs of his small but lucrative role in Superman (1978) and his seminal (also lucrative) supporting turn in Apocalypse Now (1979) were still to come for Brando, but he struggled to maintain his movie star status, and only intermittently acted in his later years. The Godfather Part II went on to be a financial success that stands alongside its predecessor as one of the greatest films of all time, with many considering it superior, while it surpassed the original’s Oscar haul, taking home six to its three.

3. Crispin Glover – Back to the Future Part II (1989)

The one’s a doozy. In Robert Zemeckis’s future sci-fi classic Back to the Future (1985), Crispin Glover brought quirky charisma to the role of Marty McFly’s nerdy and nervous dad, George, playing him both as a present-day parent and teen.

Glover told the filmmakers his reservations about the morality of the ending, which saw the family ending up rich, and told The AV Club in 2012 that, when it came to the sequel, "they didn’t want me in the film". He went on to explain that he was offered $150,000, "less than half of what my fellow actors [Lea Thompson and Tom Wilson] were making, who were coming back for similar-sized roles", but called reports that he had asked for the same salary as Michael J Fox a "total fabrication".

Since no agreement was reached, George McFly was played in the second instalment by Jeffrey Weissman, who the filmmakers attempted to pass off as Glover. Weissman wore prosthetics based on moulds of Glover’s face taken from the original, with his performance interspersed with portions of Glover’s own, shot during the making of the first film. Glover filed a lawsuit, telling BBC Radio 5 Live in 2011, "they owned the character that they wrote but they didn’t own me". Although the case was settled outside the courts, it was said to be what prompted the Screen Actors Guild to introduce rules against reproducing likenesses without agreement.

Back to the Future Part II was financially successful, though critically less loved, while the franchise would come to a close a year later with a third film that had been shot back-to-back. Glover turned to indie films in the '90s, before re-entering the mainstream in the Charlie’s Angels series, reuniting with Zemeckis on 2007’s Beowulf.

4. Arnold Schwarzenegger – Predator 2 (1990)

Although there had been flops and disappointments along the way, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a well-established action lead by the time he took on the Predator in 1987, following his success in the likes of The Terminator and Commando. The critics weren’t kind, but John McTiernan’s sci-fi actioner was a sizeable hit, with Schwarzenegger describing it in a 2015 Q&A as one of his "absolute favourite projects".

Schwarzenegger was included in the original plans for 1990’s sequel, which took the action from the jungle to an inner-city Los Angeles, plagued by warring drug cartels. Speaking to Collider in 2011, producer John Davis described how Schwarzenegger almost made Predator 2 but "the deal broke down over $250,000". Instead, the script was rewritten and Lethal Weapon’s Danny Glover took the lead, with Schwarzenegger making Total Recall.

Arnie would become one of the biggest stars of the 1990s, whereas Predator 2 was an artistic failure and box office disappointment, making $40 million less than the first film. However, since then, the Predator franchise has thrived, with the release of the successful but critically lambasted Alien vs Predator crossover films (2004 and 2007), as well as Predators (2010) and The Predator (2018).

More recently, things have headed off in an inspired new direction under the stewardship of director Dan Trachtenberg, with Prey (2022), the animated Predator: Killer of Killers (2025) and Predator: Badlands (2025) being rapturously received. And it’s all been possible without the original, cigar-chomping star.

5. Michael Keaton – Batman Forever (1995)

For many, Michael Keaton is the Batman. With that slightly twisted twinkle in his eye, he slots perfectly into Tim Burton’s playfully gothic vision (the pair had previously collaborated brilliantly on 1988’s Beetlejuice). After Burton’s departure following 1992’s Batman Returns, Keaton considered staying on as the Caped Crusader, but he wasn’t impressed by the direction incoming helmer Joel Schumacher wanted to take.

In a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Keaton offered a frank, "It sucked," when recalling the script he was shown by Schumacher. "I knew it was in trouble when he said: 'Why does everything have to be so dark?'"

Val Kilmer ended up donning the Batsuit for Batman Forever, a colourful and pretty chaotic entry that was a hit with audiences, if less so with reviewers. Although it wasn’t much cop and Kilmer wasn’t a patch on Keaton, it was better than what came after it – 1997’s Batman & Robin, a truly terrible entry which brought the franchise to a screeching (albeit only temporary) halt.

Keaton had some wilderness years after hanging up his cape, but he won acclaim and a Golden Globe by riffing on his Batman days when he took on the role of a washed-up superhero actor in 2014’s Birdman. He would return to the Batman role in 2023’s The Flash.

6. Keanu Reeves – Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)

If the edgier and more adult Point Break showed audiences Keanu Reeves’s potential as an action star, then 1994’s wildly successful bomb-on-a-bus flick Speed sent the actor stratospheric, with Keanu’s chemistry with fellow rising star Sandra Bullock giving the movie some heart, in amidst the peril.

Yet when it came to the 1997 sequel – this time set aboard an out-of-control, erm, cruise ship – Keanu wasn’t keen. In an interview with Jimmy Kimmel in 2015 he said, "It was just a situation in life where I got the script and I read the script and I was like: Ahhh!", incredulously telling TV host Graham Norton in 2021, "Now it’s on an ocean liner?"

Bullock was reluctant too (and has since been comparably withering about the film’s legendarily ludicrous concept), but she signed on regardless, and was accompanied in her plight by bland newbie Jason Patric.

It might seem like Reeves dodged a bullet – or, in this case, a low-speed cruise ship – by ducking out of Speed 2, which famously bombed at the box office and was roundly ridiculed. The actor’s big film that year was The Devil’s Advocate, which did decent business, while a couple of years later he made The Matrix. However, in an interview with GQ in 2019, Reeves recalls finding himself in "movie jail" after turning down the Speed sequel, noting that he didn’t work with Fox for more than a decade afterwards.

7. Jodie Foster – Hannibal (2001)

Just as Anthony Hopkins is Hannibal Lecter, Jodie Foster is Clarice Starling, with her riveting turn as The Silence of the Lambs’ gutsy but terrified FBI trainee securing her a second best actress Oscar in 1992.

Foster and co waited years for Silence of the Lambs author Thomas Harris to deliver the follow-up, but the resulting 1999 book took Starling and serial killer Lecter’s relationship in a deranged new direction. The actress told Variety in 2026 that, after learning that original director Jonathan Demme had opted out of an adaptation based on the source material’s outlandishness, the decision not to sign up was "easy", adding: "Luckily, I was doing something else, so I was able to say, 'Ah! No. I’m shooting something else.'"

Although it was a box office smash, Hannibal is a pretty unpleasant, sometimes humorously OTT stain on its predecessor’s legacy, with new director Ridley Scott struggling to make good the material, and Foster’s replacement Julianne Moore entirely forgettable as Clarice.

Foster would eventually return to the detective genre to great acclaim in HBO series True Detective: Night Country in 2024, winning outstanding lead actress at the Emmys, as well as best actress at the Golden Globes.

8. Linda Hamilton – Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

Linda Hamilton’s journey from The Terminator’s bewildered waitress to Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s hard-bitten and hench action heroine is one of the most satisfying transformations in cinema and, to this day, the actress has yet to fully escape from the shadow of her character, Sarah Connor.

In late 2000, Hamilton turned down the chance to return to the role in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, telling The Independent on Sunday in 2001 that the script, "didn’t take my character in any new directions", focusing as it did on Sarah’s son John and Arnie’s reprogrammed T-850.

Hamilton was further put off by the absence of her ex-husband James Cameron in the director’s chair, whom she had collaborated with so well before, summing it up by saying, "The best I could hope for was that I wouldn’t be compared unfavourably with myself 10 years ago. Without Jim breathing the breath of life into the film? No, thank you."

Directed by Jonathan Mostow, Terminator 3 didn’t hit the heights of its predecessors artistically, but it did decent business and was fairly warmly received. It opted to kill Sarah off in Hamilton’s absence, yet this legendary female character and the actress that plays her would return several films down the line in the sixth instalment, 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate, which directly follows on from the second, ignoring the intervening instalments. Although it flopped at the box office, Dark Fate won praise from some critics for returning to the spirit of the first two films.

9. Will Smith – Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

He’d made Bad Boys the year before, but 1996’s sci-fi smash Independence Day really cemented Will Smith’s movie star status when it made more than $800 million at the box office. Smith’s ability to ground the action and lighten the mood was a pivotal part of why that movie worked so well, and there were reasons to believe a sequel might struggle without him.

The sequel’s path to the screen wasn’t straightforward. Although a follow-up had been mooted back in 2001, it failed to get off the ground. MovieWeb claimed in 2011 that Smith had asked for $50 million to return, with returning director Roland Emmerich informing the New York Daily News two years later that Smith was "too expensive".

However, Emmerich has since suggested that Smith was back in the frame further down the line and that the script had to be hastily rewritten when it didn’t work out, telling TheWrap in 2022: "Will Smith decided while we were preparing to drop out. That was a huge, huge blow," attributing Smith’s exit to his decision to star in 2016’s Suicide Squad, in a 2019 Yahoo Movies UK interview.

Smith has tended to be tight-lipped about his specific reasons for swerving the sequel (the less charismatic Liam Hemsworth replaced him), but the actor told Yahoo Movies in 2015, "It was terrible when I found out my character died." Opting for Suicide Squad was, on balance, the better decision. Both films were panned by critics but, while Resurgence underperformed financially, Suicide Squad was at least a commercial success. Incidentally, Smith didn’t sign up to the sequel to that one either.

10. Neve Campbell – Scream VI (2023)

Neve Campbell has every right to feel possessive over the Scream series. As iconic horror heroine Sidney Prescott, Campbell was the gutsy, classy and indestructible star of the first five Scream movies. Despite expressing an interest to return for a sixth instalment, during salary negotiations, that changed – with Campbell releasing a statement saying, "I felt the offer that was presented to me did not equate to the value I have brought to the franchise."

Scream VI, which featured series stalwart Courteney Cox supporting newer stars Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, went forward without Campbell and was a hit. However, its directors, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, had to bail on 2026 follow-up Scream 7 due to scheduling conflicts, before star Barrera was fired following pro-Palestinian social media posts, with Ortega and new director Christopher Landon exiting soon after. Eventually, the writer of the first two and fourth Scream films, Kevin Williamson, signed on to direct, with Campbell returning to the fore.

Scream 7 is the low point of the series artistically (residing at just 30 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes) but it was a huge box office success, becoming the highest grossing film in the series – a sign that audiences were happy to see Neve Campbell back where she belongs.

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