To see where the most recent addition, Top Gun: Maverick, falls on the ranking, jump ahead. Note: This list has been updated (and will continue to be updated) to account for new releases that warrant inclusion. They remind us that more is more can indeed be a righteous course.
The sequels that rank highest are those that managed to distract us from the inevitable commercialism in Hollywood and our cynicism about the future of moviegoing. But more often than not, we rewarded pure pleasure. The final 101 choices showcase sequels that introduce new ideas and behaviors and filmmakers who set precedent for not only their own franchises but for the genre worlds beyond them. (In that sense, movie sequels to TV series counted.) Our single rule: Only one film per franchise could appear on the list - so the Broccoli family’s Bond world and the MCU get just one entry apiece, while the Batmans and Spider-Mans, having had multiple distinct incarnations, were eligible for repeat appearances. What we looked for from each film was the nature of its sequelness, or how much a movie builds off its audience’s preexisting relationship to a story or world. There are straightforward sequels legacy sequels, featuring an actor from a long-ago hit returning to engage with a new generation in the film’s universe stealth remakes, where a new filmmaker departs from the original work and changes the genre (from, say, a haunted-house film to a war film), tone (from poker-faced to borderline parodic), or even the level of self awareness (to the point of contemplating what it was about the original that inspired sequels to it in the first place) and interquels and prequels and titles you may well consider to be spin-offs, because what are these if not subcategories of sequels? For the purposes of this list, we’ve defined a “sequel” as any follow-up installment to an existing property. Filmmakers must work within certain parameters to ensure consistency with the original entry, but the best ones treat existing hits (or flops, for that matter) as material that they can reinterpret, comment upon, or completely transform - and that’s when the continuation starts to become fascinating. There’s an art to making a genuinely good sequel. But to reflexively dismiss follow-up films is to disregard the enormous potential they hold - in the right hands they can deepen the relationship we have with characters and the worlds they populate. It’s easy to feel cynical about sequels, since they often seem like cash-grab retreads of their inspiration. That’s how sequels come into existence - and this year we’re being bombarded by them, with new Sonic the Hedgehog and Fantastic Beasts installments already in theaters, and Top Gun 2, Hocus Pocus 2, another Jurassic World, another Downton Abbey, more Minions, more Thor, even more Marvel and D.C., and Avatar 2, among others, still to come. The studio loves money, and they want more too.
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