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/Kaiserhawk]

You've got the wrong Atreides. Leto II is that, Paul was too afraid to commit to that and jumped off at the first chance.

Paul is very much in survival mode in Dune, and events of the universe have spiralled out of his control in Messiah.

[u/come-on-now-please → u/Kaiserhawk]

My interpretation of dune is that its about humans who convinced themselves that they can perfectly predict the future without their own ego interfering, but they are wrong because at the end of the day they are still upper class royalty 0.000000001%ers amd still view themselves through that lense. 

Like Paul basically commits to the jihad because hes egocentric enough to think that he HAS to matter long-term and can't just decide to smuggle himself off the planet and live an anonymous life, therefore his options are either 1-jihad without HIM(me me me me) leading to billions or 2-jihad with HIM(again, me me me) with slightly less killed. Instead of "maybe I just fuck off and a jihad doesn't happen, because instead of fanning the flames I just leave"

Same thing with leto, hes just afraid of dying and everything he does is just an elaborate excuse to keep living under the giuse of "im just doing the neccisary thing, trust me it has to be ME!"

[u/BruceLeeSin → u/come-on-now-please]

Paul never commits to the jihad. He does what he does for revenge against the emperor and the bene gesserit, even though he knows that it makes the jihad and genocide inevitable. He doesn’t live an anonymous life because his thirst for revenge doesn’t let him. That’s why he’s not a hero. He gets his fix, feels guilty, then dumps the responsibility of the golden path and the blood it comes with onto Leto II.

Leto is the ultimate monster. And he’s still a greater “hero” than Paul. Even if the ends justifying the means are very, very debatable.

[u/hyzmarca → u/come-on-now-please]

Or maybe he could just use his position as the Fremen Messiah to just command them not to have any more Jihads.