Elvis and Nadine

i read a while back that the actor who played elvis didn't want to do the film with the similarity of max to elvis in fw2 and the actress who portrayed nadine took a four year break from filming after fw2 in order to attend university

all good teenagers take off your clothes

IDK Jesse's ages, but in FW2 he was portrayed as a teenager who was after all the girls. Of course they'd not get married! Why'd Jesse marry somebody before 25 or 30 yo?

Regardless of actors issues, I think the plot moved on:

In FW1 we have Jesse as a pre-teen orphan who has troble getting to people and liked to plunder places. He ends up being caught and forced to clean his mess, where he meets Willy, an orca who denied being tamed. Being both rebel and out of their places, they become friends, then Jesse sees that Willy needs to be freed, but Jesse can't do that by himself and needs help. On the other side, there's that couple who are unable to have children, the Annie wants a son and Glen is against it, but she persuades him, he doesn't like Jesse and they don't handle well, but when Jessie comes asking for help Glen helps him instead of fighting him, Jesse gets grateful and they all become friends.

In FW2 they had to move on Jesse's mother issue. Either bring her into action or have her dead. Her appearance would mean separate Jesse from the couple, so they decided to kill her. And brought a younger brother, who was also troubling and rebel. At first the couple tries to win the kid, but soon enough he lies and they immediately lose trust on him and he keep him away from everything. At the same time the kid desperately wants to join the group, he ends up helping them being on the right place at the right time and they all get along. The girl was just a way to show to teenagers that being friend of a whale is a good way of getting girls.

Then in FW3 we already had Jessie getting along with the couple twice, his mother is gone and it's too late to talk about his father. The plot had to advance. The couple never liked the sea, and now we had whalers and a lot of sea shoots, so the couple wouldn't fit. And we'd have the relationship between a whaler manager and his son, now being the father the bad guy and the kid the good guy. It's the same formula used on other movies. It was just better to take away some old characters to provide space for new ones.