(Photo by Warner Bros. / courtesy Everett Collection)

The 100 Best Sequels of All Time

The most controversial S-word in movies? Well, no s—, that’s sequels! The sequel mixes the crass and the commercial with art, and yet there seems no fill to the moviegoers’ appetite for sequels, as they voraciously take up a bigger piece of the box office pie annually. Sequels are a gamble: We want the next Dark Knight or Godfather, Part II. Sometimes that’s what we get. And sometimes we walk into a dark theater, screen glowering with the malevolent flicker of Caddyshack II. Not surprisingly, there’s nearly a dozen sequels on our list of the 100 worst movies ever.

But we’re not here to talk about those cursed jewels! No, we’re shining a light on Batman every time he did good after rescuing Gotham that first go-around; on Vito Corleone for coming back looking younger and fresher than ever; and on Ash Campbell – remember when he upgraded his right hand for a chainsaw? They’re all part of movies that give the S-word a good name, and you’ll see them here and more on our list of sequels with the highest Tomatometer scores: The 100 best sequels of all time!

Because we got a lot of ‘splaining to do: A sequel follows up on a previous movie, typically by continuing or expanding the story with the same characters, set further in time. Simple, right? That lets us sweep in most of the movies here: Star Trek: First Contact, Spider-Man 2, John Wick 3, Toy Story 4, Star Wars: Episode V, the sixth Mission: Impossible, and Furious 7, all the way up to Blade Runner 2049. We pushed out prequels (ta-ta to Temple of Doom), meanwhile we just said no to spinoffs. That means good-bye Bumblebee. But if Bumblebee 2 does as well as the first film, it has a shot to make it here in future updates. But Creed gets into the ring because it so thoroughly continues the Rocky Balboa story and characters.

For franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, each character or group we considered their own series: Iron Man, Avengers, Captain America, etc. With the X-Men, we separated the movies by original timeline, the one started by First Class, Wolverine’s trilogy, and Deadpool‘s corner of debauchery. For characters like Batman or James Bond, each actor constitutes their own series, as the continuity is reset every time a new person enters the role. (And if you’re curious, we crunched the numbers to figure out the best movie franchise ever, too.)

We included mythological series, movies with the same character inside a vaguely connected world, like the Mad Maxes or Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name trilogy. Room was made for Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy, whose entries are all similarly titled and were originally released over a brief span of time. But we avoided unofficial trilogies, like Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy or John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy. We were originally going to leave out 10 Cloverfield Lane, citing its approach as piece of an anthology series, until The Cloverfield Paradox made enough connections to establish a universe back through to the original, proving Paradox actually good for something. And finally, every sequel on this list had to be Certified Fresh.

And now, here we go again, taking on the 100 best movie sequels ever. And this time, it’s personal. —Alex Vo