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Addams Family Values is a great title. It's short. It's snappy. It avoids resorting to Part 2 or a subtitle tucked in behind a colon. It's indicative of the much snarkier wit and satire lying just below the surface of the feature itself. The ad campaign and poster art are only slight variations on the first film's. While the initial tagline is "weird is relative", Family Values informs us that "the family just got a little stranger" and Morticia can be glimpsed holding up a dark-pated mustachioed little baby boy. How was the film received? Critically, it did manage to improve upon its predecessor. And at the box office?

Released almost two years to the day after The Addams Family hit theaters in November 1991, Family Values performed much like the first film in terms of week to week declines and final gross to opening weekend ratio (helped in both cases by the second weekend falling over the Thanksgiving holiday) but to a final result that was a significantly smaller fraction of the first's end gross. While The Addams Family launched with $24 million and wound up with just over $110 million, Addams Family Values opened at $14 million and wound up falling short of the $50 million mark when all was said and done. (I find it interesting to note that that same month also marked the depressingly underwhelming performance of Clint Eastwood's A Perfect World, which barely cracked $30 million despite featuring Eastwood coming off of Unforgiven and In the Line of the Fire, along with Costner at the height of his popularity. It isn't audience-friendly but is better than a lot of Eastwood's late '90s and early '00s output, Mystic River included).

Why the significant drop from one Family to the next? Certainly, as we advocate here at BOP, it could be a case of the quality of the first impacting the reception of the second. As a subset to that theorem, I would offer up the Analyze This maxim, which states that even if a film turns out to be both a surprise success and well-received, this doesn't mean large number of people are clamoring for a sequel, specifically if the film is a comedy. Horror, action and the like are perhaps easier targets for luring customers repeatedly. Maybe there was somewhat of a backlash to watching the repeated scenes of Wednesday and Pugsley attempting to murder their new sibling? The Addams Family was essentially a series of one-liners and sight gags tied around a dumb plot involving the attempted theft of Uncle Fester's fortune by his crooked lawyer. It was visually astute (as would be expected from a film helmed by Joel and Ethan Coen's early cinematographic collaborator) and had a screenplay by Caroline Thompson, who had shown a flair for dark tales of outsiders with Edward Scissorhands. But it also had to take its time and introduce unfamiliar viewers into the Addams universe. Such is the curse of many a first film in a series.

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