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Choosing to write about John Carpenter’s Escape from LA and A Very Brady Sequel, a pair of Chapter Twos released by Paramount in August 1996, makes me reflective of a period even slightly earlier. I was four months away from graduating from college, turning 21 and having my first drink; three months away from my second disastrous bicycle accident, two months away from my first disastrous bike accident; weeks away from spending my final semester living off campus with two women, in the house of the professor who gave me the single worst grade of my academic career before or after; wrapping up my first summer living in Portland (also with two women); and finishing with my first ever real-world employment (sole mail clerk at the head office for a 36-branch bank).

Now depending on your interests and level of credulity, you may look at that preceding paragraph and wonder: You truly didn’t have anything to drink until you were 21? (Nope. And my first time getting truly and blissfully bombed was over a year later, at a lesbian dance club, but that’s another story.) Or you may be agog at my two two-wheeled catastrophes only four weeks apart (I was hit by a car and later wiped out all on my own on a back road on my way to school. And that fall season was the first time I had ever worn a bike helmet. I don’t bike anymore). Some of you may even be torn between asking me what my secret is with the ladies, and questioning if I’m sure there was a second Brady Bunch movie. I have nothing to comment on the former, but on the latter...

Escape from LA and A Very Brady Sequel are interesting case studies for two reasons — both brought their respective series to a rather sputtering end, and, unlike many sequels, that aim to give audiences more of whatever elements they presumably loved the first time around, both films essentially remade the previous film (Escape from New York, and The Brady Bunch Movie) with similar supporting characters (and the same leads), plot beats, dialogue, and pacing, highlights and low-lights alike. I find it almost impossible to say I vastly preferred one installment to the other, but in the end, one of the would-be franchises definitely does stand tall over its rival. For Paramount, the summer started strong with Mission: Impossible and their first release of the fall — The First Wives Club — also lit a box office fire (both were record setters for openings in their day), but in between? Their other summer offerings averaged just over $20 million in grosses, fine for the pair that only cost $12 million each (A Very Brady Sequel and Harriet the Spy) and not so much for the two that cost at or near $50 million (Escape from LA and The Phantom).

Some interesting number comparisons and analysis: Escape from LA out-grossed A Very Brady Sequel — but only by $4 million. The second Brady film may have grossed 55% less than the first film ($21 million, down from $46 million), but its budget was virtually the same, and so it became simply less of a win and not a loss. Escape from LA grossed $200,000 more than John Carpenter’s other coastal escape, which is not that hot (though perhaps to be expected for a sequel to a cult hit from 15 years earlier) but becomes dismaying in light of the extreme budget uptick from $6 million to $50 million (easily the biggest of his career, a full 25% more than the runner-up, Memoirs of an Invisible Man).

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