Has any sequel successfully pulled off a hero's heel turn into villainy?

[u/Bellikron]

Plenty of standalone movies have a character fall from grace, or be revealed as a villain all along, but this rarely happens with an established character in a sequel. On paper it's a solid twist because you've already grown to trust that character in previous films, but it's really hard to pull off without feeling like a betrayal of a character arc. The Mission Impossible series has one that was received very poorly, and the only reason I hear about Pacific Rim Uprising these days is people talking about how unearned the heel turn from one of the characters felt.

I struggle to think of an example where it was done successfully in a movie. There's more examples in TV I think since there's a much longer time to build a change in a character over multiple seasons, so I'm not really considering those. Since it did start with a movie series, though, and there really isn't too much of an extended character arc given in the show, the example I can think of that kind of works is Sharon Carter in Falcon and the Winter Soldier. It was still super underdeveloped and it doesn't seem like they're going to do anything with it, but I can at least track the betrayal logic since there was kind of a meta angle about how that character had been forgotten by the movies. But even that's rather clunky.

I'm also talking specifically about situations where it wasn't clearly telegraphed by the source material or the rest of the franchise. Anakin becoming Vader was already known to the audience, for instance. I'm on the fence about whether something like Dune counts, since it's in the source material and the first two films are kind of just one long movie. I'm particularly interested in situations where it clearly wasn't the plan in the first movie but was written into a sequel.

[u/Eldritch_Lemonade]

Not really a character but District 13 in the Hunger Games universe is kind of like this, you realise they and the Capital are two cheeks of the same arse through Katniss's pov

[u/lookyloolookingatyou → u/Eldritch_Lemonade]

You mean to tell me Alma Coin had another side to her??

[u/PiercedGeek → u/lookyloolookingatyou]

Thank you! When I first read it I told my daughter I wasn't expecting Coin to flip like that 😉

[u/Xecutioner → u/Eldritch_Lemonade]

Being "two cheeks of the same arse" is a fantastic phrase.

[u/RiflemanLax → u/Xecutioner]

Yes. I am assimilating this wonderful phrase into my personal lexicon.

[u/boot2skull → u/RiflemanLax]

Yes, my list of phrases has expanded. Like an arse.

[u/Kgb725 → u/Eldritch_Lemonade]

Isnt it just coin? Its been a while since ive read the books but in the movies they have people who are decent

[u/Eldritch_Lemonade → u/Kgb725]

A bit but you could say the same about the Capital too, both were pretty much fuelled by vengeance and the end justifying the means for control

[u/EarzFish → u/Eldritch_Lemonade]

I read District 13, but my head went District 9. I was trying to figure out how District 9 could possibly be in the Hunger Games universe.