Here Comes the Sequel

Here Comes the Sequel!Acts 1.1-5

The English playwright Alan Bennett wrote a famous play about the equally famous madness of a well-known king. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, England had four kings in succession all called ‘George’, and the third of them – George III, in other words – suffered for a fair amount of his reign from some kind of mental illness, probably porphyria. So Bennett called his play The Madness of George III.

But when they came to make a movie of the play, the movie- makers faced a problem. Moviegoers were used to sequels: Spiderman II, Superman III, and so on. A title like that meant that there had been an earlier film of the same name. So they were worried that if people saw a title like The Madness of George III they would assume they had missed the first two films in the sequence – and perhaps they wouldn’t go to see what they took to be the third. So the filmmakers just called the movie The Madness of King George...

Taken from Acts for Everyone Part 1 by Tom Wright