Minor language irritation

I have been seeing ads for a movie (which will go unnamed to protect the guilty) that is the second in a series: a sequel, if you will. It even bears the mandatory numeral 2 after the title lest anyone think it is an original idea.

Then online I saw a reference to the original movie as a prequel.

Under ordinary circumstances, the neologism prequel refers to a book/movie/play that is published or produced after a previous work and which is related to that previous work, but whose action is set in the period prior to the action  in the first to appear. A book/movie/play that appears first in real time and is the beginning of a series or sequence is not a prequel.

There are variations on this theme, and complications such as where a sequel -- which comes out after the first account and is set in the period after that account -- contains lengthy flashbacks in which the action all takes place prior to the first account. I would still call the complete work a sequel, just one that has flashbacks. Some people want to call it a hybridized thing, but that strikes me as a false problem. Otherwise, you wind up with an original work that contains extensive flashbacks -- something not all that uncommon -- being a sort of prequel to itself.

At any rate, for all I know the idea of calling the first movie a prequel is just a marketing device. It seems that so many things are! Maybe they plan to reissue the first version as BLANK 1.

Someday someone will make a movie with the title, Sequel. Then they can make Sequel II: The Prequel. Then they can make The Prequel 2: The Sequel.

Or maybe I could get a life.