Are there sequels to films where the cliffhanger at the end of the previous film was ignored?

Nobody in Grease 2 ever makes any reference to the day two students left the prom in a flying car.

The first Shazam movie had an end credits scene showing Mr. Mind introducing himself to Dr. Sivana. The sequel completely ignored these characters.

End of X-Men: Days of Future Past. Past Wolverine is recovered from the harbour and taken into custody by Striker, which is demonstrated at that moment to be Mystique in disguise. So you think oh.. maybe Wolverine never becomes Weapon X and his past changes? Nope. Next movie Apocalypse and friends make off with Xaiver, so the crew has to go get him. But their jet was blown up during the whole affair, so they need an excuse to get a new one. Real-Striker shows up, they abduct some of our main cast back to the Weapon X facility, where Wolverine gets set loose to kill everyone so the heroes can take *Striker CO's* jet to replace their old one. The whole sequence is a detour just to shoe-horn Wolverine into the movie, when the cliffhanger from the previous movie leads us to believe that in the changed timeline Striker never gets his hands on Wolverine in the first place (which ended up still happening anyway).

Dominic Toretto showing up in Tokyo Drift was ignored for multiple movies. They just straight up soft rebooted the timeline because people loved Han so much.

The postcredit to Doctor Strange teases Morbo as a villain... and he never came back (except in an alternate universe)

Prometheus kinda. Elizabeth Shaw wants to visit the Engineers home planet for answers but a true sequel never happened. Instead we got Alien Covenant where halfway through the movie there is an attempted follow up except David dumps the Engineer's own deadly black goo pathogen on them all, killing them and making them barely important. It's technically a follow up but a really lame half assed one lol

The Resident Evil movies just skip past or retcon whatever happened in the previous movie in almost every single iteration. Paul W S Anderson flat out just did not care about any lore (I say this as a major fan of the games who still enjoyed the first movie quite a bit despite its lack of faith to the source material as well as each of the sequels if nothing more than mindless action for 2 hours)

Not a film but the 1980s show Sledge Hammer had the main character accidentally setting off a nuclear bomb while trying to disarm it at the end of the first season. This was done because the people in charge of the show believed that it wouldn't be renewed for a second season. And then it was renewed by the network. The second season started with a message stating that the following episodes took place 5 years before the nuclear explosion.

I always thought it was weird how at the end of 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, the last scene is Jennifer Love Hewitt in college after everything has happened and seemingly living a normal life. She goes to shower and the words “I Know” are written on the steamed glass and someone crashes through the glass, attacking her right as the end credits pop up.

At the end of Insidious, 2 I think, Elise sees something that terrifies her to her very core... Series goes to 5 films and we still don't know what it was.

A lot of post-Endgame MCU movies have some huge implications in their ending, or some big reveal in the post-credits scene, that just doesn't get acknowledged at all in later movies

Not a movie but trueblood always ended episodes like that and then started the next episode right after what you expected to be the climax which seemed to always turn into a nothing burger

Growing up, my favorite thing in the whole world was to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons for the chapter plays. Cliffhangers. They also called them serials. My favorite was Rocketman, and once it was a no-brakes chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited! The next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn't cheer. I stood right up and started shouting. This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia?? They just cheated us! This isn't fair! HE DIDN'T GET OUT OF THE COCKADOODIE CAR!

All the Resident Evil films are pretty famous for this.

Terminator did this with both Salvation and Genisys. Heck, the entire *films* were ignored. And the films ignored the tv series' cliffhanger (and continuity) as well.

Smokey & the Bandit. The end of the first one sets up a sequel perfectly. It ends with the start of the clam chowder run. They completely ignore it and instead wrote a sequel about and elephant and Bandit’s drinking problem. Yes. I’m still bitter

The end of 28 Weeks Later shows a horde of infected running towards the Eiffel Tower (showing the virus has escaped England and made it to mainland Europe). The very beginning of 28 Years Later shows text onscreen that says “the virus was able to be pushed back to England”. So I guess that doesn’t count as ignoring the cliffhanger as they did address it, but no explanation how, just not at all interested in the premise of having the virus be on the mainland.

Not necessarily a cliffhanger, but a HUGE plot point that got completely ignored was in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. There’s an entire plot in the first one that revolves around the brand the werewolves get when they’re enslaved by the vampires - they literally show the skin with the brand on it taken off Michael Sheens character and they’ve stored it in one of their history books and this was used as evidence that his character was dead. It’s literally the reason why nobody believes Kate Beckinsale when she says he’s alive because hey, we’ve got his skin showing the brand on display. In the sequel? No brand. And they show him shirtless for like half the movie. None of the werewolves have the brand. And no, it’s not like it was somewhere else on his body, like his ass or something, because 1) they show that too, and 2) they specifically say it was on his arm in the first movie. It was always weird to me that this was such a major plot point in the first movie and completely ignored in the sequel

Not really a cliffhanger, but Alien 3 essentially renders the climax and ending of Aliens useless. You spend the second half of Aliens getting the kid to safety and in the span of the opening credits of the next movie she and Hicks are dead. Such a f****** waste. 

The Resident Evil films are INFAMOUS for this. Each goes out of its way to ignore the previous one as fast as humanly possible.

The later Resident Evil movies tend to either do this or immediately handwave the cliffhanger away

Highlander 2 What was this prize of knowing the thoughts of world leaders going to be used for? They didn't know either so they made him into an alien and rendered much of Highlander pointless.

Not ignored but Mortal Kombat to Mortal Kombat Annihilation you kind of go "Wait...what?"

Half the Halloween franchise continued on tha very basis.

Not a movie, but the ending of Stranger Things S4 ends with the upside down opening up the literal earth and billowing out into Hawkins, insinuating a massive battle of some sorts, only the have S5 immediately open up with having it covered up and life is normal

This is a personal vendetta between me and the Kingsman movies. The first one obviously ended with the world in complete and total anarchy and destruction. All the world political and financial leaders heads blown up, everyone violently slaughtered each other for several minutes. Tell me there would not be apocalyptic life after.

The end of Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance plus the post-credits tease show a markedly different 3.0 than what we got. Somehow Third Impact happened? Nerv was destroyed? None of that was even suggested by the end of 2.0.

The original Species had a rat eat a piece of the alien creature and get mutated by it. Never came up in the sequel.

https://www.looper.com/123930/cliffhangers-sequels-totally-ignored/

I think a lot of people here are misinterpreting the intent of OP's question(or I am, wtf do I know?) We're not talking about sequels that quickly resolved or explained the cliffhanger but then went in a different direction. I think OP is talking about sequels that straight up pretended the cliffhanger ending didn't happen. People keep bringing up the Resident Evil movies, but iirc I don't think they ever actually did this. Didn't they always acknowledge and address the cliffhanger in the opening of the next one and then move on to a whole new plot? Highlander 2 also keeps getting mentioned but that also doesn't really count. That whole abomination of a story was actually written to accomodate the ending of the first one. They had to make them aliens/time travelers specifically *because* Conner was the last immortal left standing after he killed the Kurgen and they couldn't figure out how to explain there being more of them all of a sudden.

Not exactly a cliffhanger, but the descent two completely ignores the ending the actual ending of the descent one

There was a post in r/TopCharacterTropes that noted the like, seven times the Resident Evil movies did this. https://www.listnook.com/r/TopCharacterTropes/comments/1qnrehi/loathed_trope_the_movie_has_an_ending_the_sequel

The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum kind of do the opposite of this. Supremacy skips ahead and has a little coda that wraps up rather than introducing a cliffhanger. Ultimatum seems to ignore the time skip and coda and continues from the scene before the wrap up. >!Ultimatum has its own time skip after the first scene, but you find out that most of the movie still takes place before Supremacy’s coda, and then repeats the coda, subverting the meaning of it, making it a pivotal point in the action.!<

The Mario Brothers movie. The first one, Princess barges in needing their help. In the next movie, they’re cartoons and never met before.

At the end of Goal II our hero picks up the phone to find out that his estranged wife is pregnant. Goal III is a film about completely new characters going to the World Cup and also something about Romanian dwarf p*** if memory serves. I do not recommend you watch it. I consider it the worst professionally made film of all time and not in a good way

The ending of 28 Weeks Later shows the infected running through Paris, 28 Years Later however completely ignores that, and maintains that the virus never breached containment from the UK.

A lot of horror movies like to have one final scare as the ending, which is then never mentioned in the sequel. Nightmare on Elm Street(1984), Friday The 13th Part 5, and The Evil Dead(1981) all end with cliffhangers but they’re not followed up on in the sequels

Remember when Morbius ended with Michael Keaton’s Vulture coming out of nowhere? Implying some connection to the MCU?

Ask Annie Wilkes

X-Men Apocalypse introduced the Phoenix Force to Jean Gray only for Dark Phoenix to do it again in a different way.