The Hero's Second Journey: An Introduction

While the Hero's Journey is much discussed, today I will be beginning a 5 or 6 part series discussing something only attempted in Hollywood: the Hero's SECOND Journey.
The Hero's Second Journey is like David Eddings' Malloreon series, the sequel to his bestselling Belgariad. In The Malloreon, the main prophesied hero of destiny has been king of his little island nation, and had ten years of peace. He has a child, who is immediately kidnapped by the Child of Darkness, the second villain. After finding out about the kidnapping, Belgarion gets back in the ring for round two. There are several particularly good examples of the Second Journey in Film especially: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and The Bourne Legacy, just to name a few.
For those of you that have seen the movies, you can see why Second Journeys are generally avoided by authors who don't care about making money. Sequel series that retain the original main characters are particularly hard to write for several reasons:
1. You have to find a really good reason to drag the Hero out of his comfy little mansion that he got at the end of Trilogy #1 and throw him back onto the ring to fight again.
2. You have to come up with a completely new villain that manages to have his own reasons and motives without being a carbon copy of the original. Many authors, like Rick Riordan in his Heroes of Olympus series solve this problem by making the new guy even bigger and badder then the first dude. If they don't take the bigger, badder route then they probably take the servant of the Dark Lord who now wants revenge/his own chance at glory and destruction route, like Morgoth in Tolkien's Silmarillion and Sauron in the Lord of the Rings.
3. Character development for a character whose story arc is supposed to be finished already is very difficult, because the Hero now has to have a SECOND huge obstacle to overcome. This is obviously very hard to pull off, as there are very few authors who've managed to do it. Christopher Nolan tried to make a second rise-fall-redemption cycle for The Dark Knight Rises, and he did a spectacular job at that, but it is an incredibly tough feat.
In conclusion, if you're an author/screenwriter, a Second Hero Journey is usually only a task undertaken for the purpose of making money off of an already popular franchise. If a writer wants to try their hand at it then fine, but it should be undertaken with great caution.
COMING NEXT: The Hero's Second Cycle