Welcome to the fourth and final entry in our monthlong look at the complicated process of turning TV shows into movies, and vice versa. We started out looking at good television adaptations of films, followed that movies where new actors play famous TV characters, and last week got into the failings of The Mandalorian and Grogu:
Alan Sepinwall
Now we close things out by looking at other films that, like The Mandalorian and Grogu, aren't adaptations, but continuations. These movies share continuity and actors with the television series, rather than starting over from scratch.
As I noted, the big problem with Mando's big-screen adventure was that 1)It felt too much like an episode of the show, and 2)It didn't feel like one of the better episodes of the show. A movie that either told the kind of story that the series couldn't, or a movie that was just an A++ version of the series at its best, would have been just fine. But making a longer, more expensive installment of The Mandalorian at its most mid does no good for anyone.
Not all the films mentioned below are necessarily great. But all of them in different ways did their best to provide fans a different experience than what they could get watching these same actors play these roles on TV.
Going in roughly chronological order, though some films will get paired up with other similar ones: