Alex: "YES! America! Cheeseburgers! Giant ninja robots! Cheerleaders!" *passes out*<\/p><\/div>\n

I think there is some perception that having a number in your title usually means you\u2019re bit lower in the pecking order. The mentality is likely that if all they did to the title was slap a slightly higher number on the end, how much time could they have spent on the script, and aren\u2019t you surely about to watch a mostly recycled movie? Taking this notion to its extreme may have something to do with Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Dark Knight not sounding like a sequel to Batman Begins, and a rare superhero movie that doesn\u2019t even have the hero\u2019s most common name in the title. While sequels are already often seen as a crass way to milk the success of one movie, changing the title up makes it seem like less of a cash grab than a sequel with a simply numbered sequel. To see if there was any truth to this concept, I looked at the IMDB Top 250 films and counted how many were sequels, and how many of those were numbered sequels, meaning a number appears in the official title. Of 250, 16 are sequels (by my count) with only 6 of those being numbered sequels. Whether moviegoers take sequels without numbers less seriously, or serious\/more talented filmmakers try to avoid numbering, there does seem to be a correlation.<\/p>\n

On the entirely different end of the spectrum, there is another linguistic step you can take it naming your sequels to try and sell some tickets and that\u2019s the adorable pun. This is the route that movies like\u00a0Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties has taken, as well as both\u00a0Alvin\u00a0and the Chipmunks follow-ups, The Squeakuel and Chipwrecked, with the former term Squeakuel becoming oddly ubiquitous around the time of the movie\u2019s release. People used it as a bit of punchline of how overly adorable and sweetly annoying that movie must be. If the \u2018no press is bad press\u2019 adage is true, than this was a clever title, as it at least caused more people to talk about the movie, even if it only had the same kind of \u2018appeal\u2019 that the Hamster Dance song had. It was too sweet by half, but the term Squeakuel was something of an earworm too, and it would get stuck in your head in a way. And even though everyone rolled their eyes when they talked about it, they were still talking about it and this level of cultural relevance, even if negative, must have contributed positively to how well it stayed around and how much money it made.<\/p>\n

With things the way they are, just being memorable, for any reason, might be the most important thing. Movies have always been fighting for us to remember them more than others. Now on top of that, they are so many other forms of entertainment for cinema to compete with, and within the industry hundreds of movies and dozens of sequels are being released each year. This mean sequels have to do anything they can to earn some space on your mental to-see list, and if the wordplay that Alvin and the Chipmunks are using work, then strap yourself for The Rock and Jason Statham co-starring in 2013\u2019s Fast and Furiquel.<\/p>\n