The original NeverEnding Story wasn’t always the sacred object nostalgia’s turned it into. In North America, it grossed about twenty million against a twenty-seven million dollar budget, and critics were mixed. Its cult following grew retroactively through cable and VHS, the way a lot of 80s kids’ films did. People loved it because they grew up with it.
And even though it only adapted half of Michael Ende’s novel, it told a complete emotional story: Bastian reads the book, the book needs him, Fantasia is reborn through his imagination, and the ending leaves the rest to you.
So when the sequel was released six years later, there was a question worth asking: was there even a demand for this?
Wolfgang Petersen, the original director wasn’t returning, the original cast had aged out, so the only familiar face was Thomas Hill as Mr. Koreander. But the bigger loss was the meta-fictional interaction between reader and book, the idea that stories need you to believe in them, was gone, replaced by a standard fantasy adventure where Bastian learns a lesson about courage.
Critics at the time called it hollow. But critics don’t always matter if something touches you, and this film clearly did for the kids who found it at the right time on cable. Still, it cost thirty-five million and earned back only seventeen.
This is a very specific type of sequel, though. These films don’t try to run the first one back, rather they pile on new mythology, or ignore what made the original work, to a point where they undo the original’s point entirely. Highlander 2 retconned its immortals as aliens from a planet called Zeist, dismantling everything mysterious about the original. Cocoon: The Return negated the ending of a film whose entire dramatic crux was the departure. Some sequels rub off some of the shine from the original.
And when a sequel bombs, what makes anyone think a third will suddenly grab audiences? That’s usually the strikeout. NeverEnding Story III was released in 1994, recasting Bastian Bux again with the kid from Free Willy. It held a twenty-five million dollar budget and only made five million at the German box office, and it barely got a release in North America.
We were only ten years out from the original, not long enough for nostalgia to have done its rose-colouring work, and the second film hadn’t left the box office clamouring for more. Usually at this point, a franchise gets shipped off to TV to keep the brand alive for the die-hards. Highlander went to television in 1992 and ran six seasons, earned a spinoff, and the show was better received than any of the sequel films. It also got an Animated Series. RoboCop went pretty much the same way.
Karate Kid went there too, 2 failed movies and a cartoon. But not every franchise gets a Cobra Kai, where the poorly received movies actually get redeemed by a successful legacy TV series. That’s a rare and beautiful thing.
The NeverEnding Story got an animated series in 1995 with a single season on HBO, and that’s where the story really ended.
Another franchise stretched past the point of plausibility without a satisfying conclusion. Fini.
Jonathan Brandis got his first starring role in this movie, though, he was fourteen. That same year he played young Bill Denbrough in Stephen King’s IT miniseries and he later went on to do Sidekicks with Chuck Norris and Ladybugs with Rodney Dangerfield. By 1993, he was on SeaQuest DSV, one of the hottest sci-fi shows of the early 90s. It seemed that for a few years, this kid was everywhere.
Sadly, Brandis died in 2003 at twenty-seven. His own story ended too soon. -Pop
The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter arrived on home video in 1991, after a February 8th, 1991 theatrical release.