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The Top 10 Movie Sequels of All Time
Flying in the face of the old adage that “wanting more” is how any worthwhile entertainer should “leave ‘em,” Hollywood has never been shy about churning out a sequel. And so, in the ever-present midst of Part 2s and 3s and shared universes and spin-offs, it’s time to look at the 10 best sequels of all time!
Sequels are a strange proposition; in a lot of ways, they’re the lowest hanging fruit there is. If a movie makes money? “Well, go make three or four more of ‘em,” they yell, clamoring in the streets. By that same token, however, they’re also some of the hardest movies to pull off, and from a certain point of view, they’re actually set up to fail. They naturally have big shoes to fill based on the simple fact that they only exist because the first installment was popular – so popular, in fact, that a building full of executives decided to sink a boatload of studio resources into making another one. As a result, a properly good sequel is actually a little difficult to come by.
“But there are a variety of ways to try,” he says, segueing into his first category...
10. A Straight Continuation of the Story
The first and most obvious style of sequel-ing is the continuation of a story; these are movies that pick up right where their predecessors left off. If audiences liked the characters from the first movie enough, it’s a fair bet they’ll want to see what happens to them next. These are sequels that, in theory, you could stitch together to make one big movie.
This is how The Raid 2 works, taking place the next day with Rama’s cheeks still bloody. It’s Quantum of Solace opening on a car chase with Mr. White still in the trunk from the end of Casino Royale, or The Incredibles 2 starting with the battle against The Underminer teased in the closing moments of the first film. Kill Bill: Volume 2 doesn't necessarily count here because it was originally supposed to just be one movie, as per The Whole Bloody Affair.
As for an early example of a “picking up where we left off” sequel, the 1935 follow-up to 1931's Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, opens in a delightfully meta way. Mary Shelley, her husband Percy, and the poet Lord Byron are enjoying a roaring fire on a stormy night, talking about what an impressive story Frankenstein is. It allows Byron to recap the events of the first film and Shelley to drop a 1930s version of “if you like that, wait’ll you get a load of this sequel!” One dolly out and cross-dissolve later, we’ve got one of the first blockbuster sequels, picking up from the smoldering ruins of the old mill and even backing up a few moments to show a little more of Henry Frankenstein’s recovery. It’s a fascinating window into how they thought about sequels in the '30s, a format that’s held up well over the years; in fact, my number 10 pick owes a fair bit of its structure to The Bride of Frankenstein. I’m talking about the overlapping scenes of Back to the Future Part II.
What’s great about Back to the Future Part II is that it didn’t just pick up where the first movie left off narratively, it also picked up where it left off thematically. If Back to the Future pulled on the thread of “What if your parents didn’t meet,” the next logical question to ask is: “What does the future hold for my kids?” It was a brazen question to ask at the end of the first film, very presumptuously setting up a sequel that wasn't even planned at the time, but then Part II opened with the exact same scene...with one twist.
Director Robert Zemeckis reshot the scene to handle the recasting of Jennifer (Elisabeth Shue replaced Claudia Wells in BTTF Part II and III). The edit and shot compositions line up almost impeccably, which should surprise no one given the technical hurdles cleared by the rest of this production (such as Thomas F. Wilson’s Biffs handing things to each other), but opening the sequel by repeating the last scene of the first movie to set up even more time travel shenanigans is thematically perfect as well.
Back to the Future Part II is famously convoluted, very intentionally pulling on the confusing threads that time travel presents. What happens to the future if you change the past, or the present for that matter? The opening scene isn’t the only bit of the first Back to the Future to be recreated, of course, but those scenes are from a different perspective. And even though the recasting wasn’t the filmmakers' choice – Claudia Wells turned down the sequels to care for her ailing mother – it’s a case of using the situation to your advantage. By recreating this opening scene shot for shot, it preps the audience to look for subtle changes in the rest of the film, getting jokes to land that much better and filmmaking wizardry to play that much more impressively.
9. A Second Story
The other side of the sequel coin from the continuation of a story is a second, entirely different story. This is a harder act to pull off; given the premise that sequels only exist to follow successful films, one wouldn’t want to venture too far away from what made the first film work. But what if an original was so good, the best idea is to go in a completely new direction lest you be compared unfavorably to the first?
This is Aliens famously switching gears from Ridley Scott’s claustrophobic monster movie to an all-out action flick starring space marines. It’s Batman Returns cycling out the entire supporting cast, adding a new love interest and doubling the villains, and The Road Warrior escalating the original Mad Max from a budget-friendly dystopia fully into the post-apocalypse. This is The Godfather Part II, because it has its sequel cake and eats its prequel too with flashbacks to a young Vito Corleone in the past while continuing Michael’s story in the present. Frankly, The Godfather Part II is the answer here; it’s an all-timer of a sequel, but just as frankly, if you need another massive film-nerd essay to tell you how great it is...c’mon, man. Instead, I’m going with a sequel that perfectly illustrates the power of telling a different story all together: George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.
Romero waited almost ten years to follow up Night of the Living Dead, a movie that developed an iconic status long after its sequel. While that film was a contained, mostly single-location indie phenomenon, its sequel landed a helicopter on top of a mall. Dawn of the Dead is truly an expansion at scale of Romero’s original ideas, and most importantly, doesn’t feature any of the main characters from his original film. Of course they were all dead – spoiler alert! – so that was a bit of a necessity.
But the bigger challenge for Romero, after effectively if not officially inventing the modern zombie subgenre of horror, was showing what else could be done with the shuffling flesh-eaters. As groundbreaking a film as Night of the Living Dead was, it was Dawn of the Dead that fully established zombie films don’t have to just be about the monsters; they can be about what the monsters say about us. They can evolve with the changing social landscape, from making statements on the civil rights movement of the late '60s (although Romero never claimed to have done that intentionally) to commenting on the rampant consumerism of the late '70s.
Dawn of the Dead looked at the absurdity of modern conveniences, traditional gender roles, and toxic masculinity among other things through a blue-faced undead lens; it also gave us rad visuals like a sports car driving through an empty mall. Dawn of the Dead proved a point about an entire subgenre of horror, and it's been thriving ever since.
8. A Middle Chapter
The middle part of the aforementioned coin between the two sides that we’ve already mentioned is just as important. A lot of Part 2s are only as good as the Part 3s that follow, and often some of the sheen of a good middle chapter can get lost if chapter three sucks. As good as Spider-Man 2 is, it loses some points for an unfortunate third outing from Tobey Maguire and Sam Raimi; ditto for The Dark Knight, because The Dark Knight Rises didn't rise to near the heights of its predecessor.
But some trilogies are so solid throughout, their Part 2s look even better for reliably bridging an opening and closing chapter. Before Sunset, for example, is the meat in the sandwich of maybe the most surprising trilogy ever made. Pusher is a trilogy that’ll make your nose bleed with a middle chapter that made a star out of Mads Mikkelsen, while The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers redefined epic-scale action with the WETA-fueled battle of Helm’s Deep. In fact, Peter Jackson’s second helping of Tolkien might be the ultimate middle chapter if it weren’t for our number 8 pick, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
For there to even be a category for middle chapters in this movie list, the concept of trilogies has to exist. You can count The Golem films, even though two-thirds of the silent German Expressionist films have been lost to time, and of course Frankenstein technically became a trilogy (and then some), but The Empire Strikes Back ran with the idea of a continuing story like nothing before it.
As a sequel, it was a surprising departure from Star Wars, featuring very little that looked or felt like the four-quadrant popcorn thrills of George Lucas’ space opera. It dared to open with our heroes – Leia, Han, and Luke, along with the entire rebellion that, last we saw, struck a major blow by exploding that entire Death Star – on the back foot. In the space of an opening crawl, they’re suddenly outgunned, outmanned, and scampering from one hideout to the next.
But the way the film ended on a down beat is its true contribution to cinema. The rebels didn’t get a single win throughout the entire movie, and the credits start rolling like it’s no big deal! There’s zero intention on the part of The Empire Strikes Back to be the end of the story. It wasn’t shot back-to-back as a planned trilogy, however; Back to the Future would pull that trick later in the decade, and The Lord of the Rings wouldn’t bring it into blockbuster vogue for another 20 years. Even with the success of Star Wars, George Lucas had to fight to get The Empire Strikes Back made the way he wanted it, and there was no guarantee of a third installment. Still, he had the chutzpah to pull off that ending, a gutsy move that made Empire one of the best Part 2s of all time.
7. A Franchise Entry
When is a sequel not a sequel? When is a middle chapter not in the middle? Now we’re talking franchises, and what is a good franchise entry if it doesn’t do a little of everything we’ve already said we need from a good sequel?
There’s no small amount of “moving the ball forward” needed from a franchise entry, and Marvel was the standard bearer for a solid decade of world building. Captain America: The Winter Soldier narratively made waves throughout the rest of the films and TV series while doing it with heart, while Guardians of the Galaxy introduced a whole new team that fit right into the universe’s tone and moved the larger Thanos plot ahead. Logan wasn’t technically part of that world until much later, but it showed what you could do to an audience that had grown up with Wolverine and didn’t want to say goodbye.
DC didn’t have much luck worth mentioning with the Snyderverse, and interconnected world-building is a pretty rare thing on the big screen. Kong and Godzilla have versus’d and X’d into New Empires in recent years, but our number 7 pick goes to the longest-running franchise not about an atomic kaiju, the James Bond series – and in particular, 1964's Goldfinger.
Bond, James Bond has been going strong (a few pigeons double-taking aside) since the 1960s, and is one of the most bankable franchises of anything, cinematic or otherwise. It's here because right up until Daniel Craig’s entries, there just isn’t enough connective tissue between the films to qualify as sequels. Love interests are swapped out each time, the actor is recast every handful of films, and there’s practically no shared history between them outside of a reference or two to a dead wife.
It wasn’t until the third 007 film, Goldfinger, that the series' creators thoroughly hashed out the formula. Dr. No and From Russia with Love came first, but the Bond we know officially started with Auric Goldfinger and his plot to irradiate the gold in Fort Knox so that his supply would become the most valuable in the world. It was an outlandishly villainous plot, featuring lasers aimed at Sean Connery’s crotch, a tricked-out Aston Martin, a quirky henchman with a hyper-specific way to murder people, globetrotting to luxurious locales, and the iconic image of a woman suffocated by gold paint. Goldfinger molded the franchise into a reliable format that hasn’t changed much since; it’s been worth making fun of from French parodies to Mike Myers in dual leading roles and one of the most iconic episodes The Simpsons ever made, so it must have done something right.
6. A Spin-Off
Akin to the franchise entry, we’ve also got the spin-off, and there’s an important distinction to make here. If a film series has generated a few sequels along one storyline, the first time they venture off to focus on new characters, it’s not quite a franchise yet...but it is a spin-off.
Animation worlds expand rapidly, giving us the Minions from the mainline Despicable Me sequels...which I mention first because I have children, and Minions are rarely far from my mind. Puss in Boots added to the Shrekverse in wildly unconnected ways, with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish being a legitimately gorgeous-to-look-at film, while The Lego Batman Movie showed us more of the heart that the two main Lego movies surprised us all with.
Horror franchises are particularly good here as well, with any number of Conjuring spin-offs following the exploits of demons and Annabelles and Nuns on spooky side quests. Action franchises have turned in some good entries too, with Laika’s Travis Knight bringing his stop-motion expertise to Transformers and Bumblebee, while Hobbs & Shaw spun away to be fast and furious all by themselves. And although Prey was a fantastic Predator film nobody saw coming, for our number 6 pick, I’m going with another Dan Trachtenberg film that took us by surprise: 10 Cloverfield Lane.
10 Cloverfield Lane is kind of the ultimate spin-off – the beginning of a would-be anthology series that sputtered out pretty hard its next time out. But the film also began its life as something else entirely, a spec script with a different title and a different ending. Seeing that the story shared DNA with the city-stomping kaiju found footage gem that came before it – a film also shrouded in a fair bit of mystery before its release – inspired the decision to make it a Cloverfield entry of sorts.
That real-world context aside, 10 Cloverfield Lane is also a perfect spin-off because it pulls on the same threads as the original, but from a wildly different perspective. Instead of seeing the devastation wrought by the invading kaiju first-hand, we’re left to stew in the paranoia of whether or not it’s actually happening. Dan Trachtenberg traps us in a basement and uses an expert fluency in the language of thriller cinema to set up obstacles, shift the focus of the danger, and finally reveal the truth, all in a modestly budgeted movie contained to a single location. There are no cities destroyed or chaotic camcorder footage of the Statue of Liberty’s head, but the small-scale havoc in a doomsday bunker is no less impactful.
5. A Changing of the Guard
There is a different flavor of spin-off that features a subtle enough hallmark to deserve its own category; this is the changing of the guard. This is not, mind you, simply recasting a new actor in the lead role of a film series or rebooting the thing all together; rather, this is when a torch is well and truly passed to a different character.
Having said that, I will naturally give Batman Forever a shout-out here as the exception to the rule, as the new Bruce Wayne AND new director AND expansion of the Bat-family counts for something. Ghostbusters: Afterlife had the right idea to change the entire setting of its long-range sequel in addition to its protagonists, leaving New York City for the plains of rural Oklahoma. The new set of Dwayne Johnson-led Jumanji films did the same, as did Ballerina in the John Wickverse. Wes Craven’s meta-as-hell New Nightmare tried a much more unorthodox passing of the torch from fiction to “non-fiction,” and for the most part, it worked out to be a lot of weird fun, if for no other reason than it was clearly laying some groundwork for Scream. But nobody quite so effectively handed the baton from one generation to the next like Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan did with Creed.
Creed would inspire two of its own sequels, neither of which were bad by any measure, but Coogler and Jordan’s first round following the illegitimate son of an all-time great who died in the ring reconnecting his father's former rival-turned-friend – whew! – would have been a great movie on its own. It’s a study of legacy and inheritance, and how to incorporate the shadow you live under into your own story. Creed was clearly made with a genuine love for the original series and an understanding of not only what made them great, but also how to bring a fresh perspective to the series. Plus, it’s got some incredible fight choreography to boot.
But it’s not a stand-alone movie; it’s a sequel to six movies in which Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky fought well past his sell-by date. Stallone’s Oscar-nominated run as the aging boxer transitioning into a mentor makes the movie literally about one generation letting go of the past and embracing what the new generation can offer, which is a meta narrative we can get behind. It's not quite the New Nightmare brand of meta, mind you, but still a good dose of context with which to enjoy the movie that much more.
It also features one of the most incredibly timed blasts of nostalgic music in film history. The Bill Conti horns from Rocky’s original soundtrack coming out of absolutely nowhere become Adonis’ theme as he stands up for his final round. It’s a single moment in the entire film’s runtime that cements Creed’s legacy as the best changing of the guard sequel in quite some time.
4. A Long-Range Sequel
Similar to the guard-changing sequel, these are reboot-quels...or legacy-quels...ugh, there are two cutesy names for the same thing. While they’re neighbors to the point of sharing a wall in a duplex, the long-range sequel doesn’t endeavor to generate a new series. It’s not telling a different story or following a side quest like a spin-off; instead, it picks up the same narrative from years ago. While this seems like a newer phenomenon given the nostalgia fervor of the last several years, it’s important to recognize that there are older examples. Scorsese’s sequel to The Hustler, The Color of Money, finds an aging Fast Eddie taking a young Tom Cruise-looking billiards talent under his wing, and even Ingmar Bergman revisited his epic chamber piece, Scenes from a Marriage, with Saraband thirty years later.
Mad Max: Fury Road counts here instead of as a changing-of-the-guard sequel because Tom Hardy was technically playing Max. But Top Gun: Maverick, T2 Trainspotting, and 2018’s Halloween from David Gordon Green all did the legacy thing well. And even though Keanu Reeves has helped bring back both Bill and Ted and the Matrix after lengthy layoffs, the king of the long-range sequel seems to be Harrison Ford, from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, to two very unnecessary Indiana Jones sequels, to our number 4 pick: Blade Runner 2049.
In 1982, Blade Runner changed the way science fiction looked for an entire generation, and as the first big-screen adaptation of a Philip K. Dick work, it raised ideas that writers are continuing to grapple with today. It also really didn’t need a sequel; in fact, a sequel really shouldn’t make sense. The film was very much not a commercial success, but the decades-long debate as to whether Deckard was a replicant or not added to the film’s mystique, as did the many iterations of the film that have been released since its original theatrical run.
What makes Blade Runner 2049 brilliant is that it continues its predecessor's ambiguity; it both answers and doesn’t answer some of the original's biggest questions. No matter how you come down on the Deckard replicant question, you’re able to watch 2049 and continue believing whatever you like. Director Denis Villeneuve seemed to be under no obligation to clarify anything about the original or fill in the nitpicky gaps that so many legacy-quels get fixated on. Ryan Gosling’s K is not the new standard bearer for the franchise, nor is he even the Luke-Skywalker-style chosen one on whom the plot hinges; he’s a cog in a bigger story – one that’s not his, which allows Blade Runner 2049 to explore the questions of humanity that the first Blade Runner raised so ambiguously and intriguingly a generation before.
3. A Spiritual Sequel
We’re down to our final three categories, so it’s time to stray a little further afield into what is traditionally my favorite part of movie listing. Let’s get a little weird and transcend the narrative to arrive in the astral plane of the spiritual sequel. These are the movies when a filmmaker revisits an idea or a theme rather than stories or characters; they're often recognizable in a director's style more than the substance on screen, which makes them extra fun to spot.
This is Richard Linklater’s easy hangout on the baseball diamond, Everybody Wants Some!!, as the successor to the landmark high school slice-of-life, Dazed and Confused. It’s Robert Rodriguez' Desperado following up El Mariachi. You can also make an argument for nearly all of Hayao Miyazaki’s work but I’ve always felt like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke have always shared more DNA than the rest. Ridley Scott’s The Duellists and The Last Duel share a bit more than just that one word in their titles, and they make for interesting partners. Carlito’s Way is Brian De Palma maturely looking back at Scarface’s greedy, never-gonna-die energy from ten years earlier. But where crime epics are concerned – and spiritual sequels, for that matter – nobody’s done it quite so well as Martin Scorsese in Casino.
Whether you believe it or not, and if you absolutely have to take a hard stance on this kind of thing, Casino might actually be better than Goodfellas; at minimum, the way it will always be the latter’s little brother is the real crime. Casino digs into a criminal enterprise across decades, consuming shady characters of all sorts in its vortex of glamour, greed, and violence. The film has endured its share of unfavorable comparisons to Goodfellas when it was first released and in the years since...but Marty is just so goddamn good at this.
With the glittering lights of the mob-run Las Vegas strip, Scorsese painted his organized crime canvas with a whole new setting, and from a different perspective as well. Where Goodfellas followed a man in love with the life afforded by the mob, Casino was about a man obsessed with order and control. While Casino largely follows the rise-and-fall structure of most of the best crime movies, Robert De Niro's Sam "Ace" Rothstein can’t control the downfall of the wise guys' racket in Vegas. But still, under the brutality of the life they’ve all agreed to, there's a sort of nostalgia – even an admiration – for the way things worked under the mob. They had a good thing going, and the story of how even they couldn’t make it last is a fascinating portrait that deserves to sit alongside Goodfellas. One doesn’t need to be better than the other; we’re lucky to have both.
2. A Thematic Trilogy
Now that we’ve properly slipped the surly bonds of sequel gravity, let’s tack on a whole other movie. You know what? Let’s tack on two whole other movies! When a spiritual sequel just isn’t enough, and an idea is so worth exploring, a filmmaker might revisit the same idea three times in a thematic trilogy.
Some are quite obvious: Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy, for example, digs into the metaphors behind the colors of the French flag. There’s the curious, sensory extravaganza of the Qatsi trilogy tied together as a study of man’s obsession and ambition, and there’s Edgar Wright’s Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy connected by genre parody and throwaway references to ice cream.
While Roy Andersson’s Living Trilogy took 15 years to complete, as did Wong Kar-Wai’s Love trilogy, there are thematic trilogies that arrive in quick bursts of creativity, like Ingmar Bergman’s Silence of God films, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Alienation trilogy in the early '60s, and Yasujiro Ozu’s Noriko Trilogy in the late '40s and early '50s. That all nine of those films riffed on the theme of traditions chafing against the mid-century's oncoming modern lifestyle honestly makes them all related, at least in my brain. But for my number 2 pick, it's hard to beat Park Chan-wook and the Vengeance Trilogy.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance comprise three chapters of warped revenge tales. The three films are consistently difficult, offering no real catharsis for their revenge-minded characters. It’s a challenging collection of tortuous psychological thrillers, each executed with a unique noir-ish style and a funny little spoonful of sugar that helps the bleak, violent medicine in the rest of the movies go down. Each of the three movies presents a different story with the same results, focusing on an obsessed protagonist violently seeking revenge that it’s hard to argue they don’t deserve. The result is a sense of relatability to the characters, and the realization that terrible things can happen to anybody, and that anybody is also capable of terrible things in their search for retribution.
With his Vengeance Trilogy, Park Chan-wook presents a twisted perspective that doesn’t leave many on screen untarnished. Buoyed by the cult-classic masterpiece status of its middle installment, Oldboy, it’s a trilogy that’s as consistent in style, tone, and narrative as any start-to-finish three-part story could hope to be, making it one of the best thematic trilogies cinema has ever seen.
1. Better Than the Original
What is a sequel’s purpose if not to expand upon the original? Well, how about “be better than the original?” What parent doesn’t want to see their children do greater things? These are a rarer breed of sequel to be sure, but for our last spot, we have to honor those sequels that saw what their predecessors did and thought, “nah, I can beat that!”
The Bride of Frankenstein, as we mentioned above, is better and more lasting in a lot of ways, as many of the tropes we associate with Frankenstein actually come from Bride as opposed to the first film. I’ll also go to bat for Paddington 2 as one of this century's greatest movies, period, until I draw my last breath; writer/director Paul King doubled down on everything that made the first movie charming as hell in exactly all the right ways. Ditto for Hot Shots! Part Deux...but I won’t explain myself on that one.
To be honest, most of our other picks in this list, it could be argued, also surpassed their predecessors and would be quite at home in this category as well, but I’ve saved the best for number 1 with Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Terminator 2 is a sequel that’s better than the original on every level. James Cameron wrangled a convoluted time travel plot into something manageable, efficient, and with an outsized heart. If 1984’s The Terminator was a simple sci-fi thriller machine, T2 adds nuances of fate and destiny, as well as the terrible burden of knowing how things are going to turn out. Arnold’s T-800 learning to be more human along the way is a fantastic lesson for sequel-ers everywhere, who too often fall more in love with crafting mind-blowing narrative mythologies than they do creating involving characters on screen.
James Cameron’s technical innovations took leaps and bounds as well. Inventing new ways to feature realistic computer graphics in the early days of the CGI revolution, the film also boasts practical effects that would surprise you for a film with a reputation for being so computer FX-heavy. It's the blend of the two where Cameron’s brilliance lies, and still does all the way through to the motion-capture tech on Avatar.
T2 should also, quite frankly, have been the end of Terminator as a franchise. Judgment Day wrapped things up so perfectly that it has to be at least part of the reason nobody’s been able to give a damn about the movies that have followed, making it not only better than the first, but impossible to top and maybe the greatest sequel of all time.
