Hey, remember March of the Penguins? It’s been 13 years since a National Geographic-produced documentary about emperor penguin migration grew into a global phenomenon, and in a sense, it feels even longer. The year 2005 now looks like a foreign country, where Labour still ruled Britain, we thought the Bush family was the worst thing that could happen to American politics, and a family-friendly nature doc could become a hot-button topic: lest we forget, Luc Jacquet’s film wasn’t just a popular hit and an Oscar winner, but a beloved cause of conservative politicians, who argued for its cutely anthropomorphised presentation of penguin mating as a celebration of traditional family values. To be clear, the world was insane in 2005 too – just differently so.

Alt-right spokesmen tend not to bother with such niceties as metaphors any more, but here’s their chance to reappropriate those poor penguins anyway: a sequel, imaginatively titled March of the Penguins 2: The Next Step, is out in the US this week, a year after making its French debut. Give or take some more advanced shooting technology, it’s much the same deal as before, with Morgan Freeman’s benevolent tones narrating another ravishing, family-centred portrait of stout-hearted, puny-winged birds – a father and son, this time – battling the Antarctic odds.

If it looks like they may be spared the indignity of Fox News debates and an Ivanka Trump endorsement, however, that’s because the film is being released into a relative void. Going directly to VOD, it’ll have no chance to match the £77m US gross that made its predecessor the second highest-grossing documentary of all time: it’s no more of an event than a weekly Animal Planet special. Which is no slight on the film itself – just an indication that March of the Penguins’ strange, alchemical cultural moment has passed.

Yet it’s only the latest in a recent run of tardy sequels to culture-defining documentaries of the previous decade and beyond – evidence, perhaps, that even the documentary realm has fallen prey to the industry’s risk-averse devotion to existing properties and proven formulae, though few have fully made the case for returning to the well.

Last year saw Al Gore turning back the clock to the surprise 2006 success of An Inconvenient Truth – an informatively right-on if blandly PowerPoint-style cinematic lecture on the dangers of climate change that connected with the public to the tune of £35m worldwide. (And with Hollywood to the tune of two Oscars: they loved it so much it even beat Beyoncé in the best song race.) Given lofty premiere spots in Sundance and Cannes last year, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power certainly didn’t feel out of time: if anything, arriving just as Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris agreement, the film struggled to keep pace with its own topicality, necessitating some hasty additions and adjustments before its Cannes date a few months later.

Trump’s disastrous decision may have been proof that 11 years on, Gore’s mission to raise climate change awareness was still a depressingly necessary one. But that continued relevance couldn’t pull an audience to a film many felt, not unreasonably, that they’d already seen: the message was relevant, yes, but it wasn’t exactly new. Politely but dispassionately reviewed, An Inconvenient Sequel wound up with a mere tenth of its predecessor’s box office and failed to make the Academy’s final documentary roster.

Still, that’s a dream outcome compared to the ignominious fate of Buena Vista Social Club: Adios, last year’s follow-up to Wim Wenders’ 1999 arthouse smash – a vibrant, loose-limbed concert doc that made the eponymous veteran Cuban jazz troupe a staple coffee-shop soundtrack to this day. Directed by the esteemed Lucy Walker, the sequel was supposed to be a poignant farewell of sorts, tenderly but candidly documenting the group’s final tour and its surviving individual members’ journey into retirement. It wound up more bitter than sweet, however, when the film entered post-production hell so extreme that its Sundance premiere was cancelled mere hours ahead of time. In response to complaints from the group that the film was too bleak and not sufficiently music-focused, it was taken out of Walker’s hands and drastically re-edited: the director claimed never to have seen the cut that finally limped into cinemas to chilly reviews and dismal six-figure box office – as unfortunate a cautionary tale as any that successful documentary-making is all too often a matter of capturing lightning in a bottle.

Can Michael Moore, America’s most loudly defiant doc-maker, buck the trend as he gets in on the sequel action? Announced last year at Cannes – where his Bush-baiting political screed Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme d’Or in 2004, a then-buzzy decision that hasn’t aged especially well – Moore’s upcoming Fahrenheit 11/9 will reportedly give Donald Trump’s presidency an equivalently irate drubbing. It’s a sequel opportunity prompted by circumstance more than anything else, which may give Moore’s film a more urgent edge than a new March of the Penguins film, at any rate – while Moore’s recent battle to extricate it from the clutches of the embattled Weinstein Company serves as another accidental reminder of just what different universes 2004 and 2018 are. In the world of documentaries especially, the clock never stops ticking.