The 15 best, and the 15 worst, movie threequels ever made

Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell could have gone back to the same cabin in the woods for the third Evil Dead film and done just fine. But Army Of Darkness was a different beast from the very beginning, and it paid off in stunning ways. From its old-school visual effects to its bonkers Three Stooges energy, Army Of Darkness is unlike any other trilogy capper ever made, and that’s a very good thing.

“Let’s go back to the Old West” could have fallen flat, but Back To The Future Part III just works. The film’s ingenious re-use of the franchise’s various stars, its sense of whimsical fun, and a great spotlight performance from Christopher Lloyd all served to sell us on Marty McFly’s trip back to Hill Valley in the 1800s. Best of all, it’s still a blast even if you haven’t seen the first two movies.

The Bourne Supremacy is a great sequel, so great that it seemed impossible for star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass to surpass it with a follow-up. When it finally arrived, The Bourne Ultimatum not only matched Supremacy’s high-octane energy, but topped it, delivering another action spectacular rooted in remarkably human-scaled violence and tension. Plus, Jason Bourne beats a dude up with a book in this one, and that’s just fun.

Sure, it might be more like Avengers 2.5 than Captain America 3, but that doesn’t take away from the sheer force of Civil War’s impact. Directors Joe and Anthony Russo marshaled an all-star cast and a packed plot from writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely to make something that feels simultaneously like a perfect sequel to The Winter Soldier and a perfect prelude to what they’d do with the next two Avengers films.

The first Bond film set the tone, the second cemented the formula, and the third followed all the rules of its predecessors while adding style points galore. From the debut of Bond’s Aston Martin to the gripping finale, Goldfinger remains the yardstick by which all 007 films are measured, and still ranks as one of the best action movies ever.

It’s hard to top a film that changed Western cinema forever, but that didn’t stop star Clint Eastwood and director Sergio Leone. A Fistful Of Dollars is a landmark film, For A Few Dollars More is a masterpiece in its own right, but The Good, The Bad And The Ugly is something else entirely. It’s a transcendent piece of Western filmmaking, the kind of perfect cinematic storm that comes along only rarely, and it feels just as powerful now as it did five decades ago.

The Harry Potter movies were always going to do well thanks to the sheer cultural impact of their source material. But Alfonso Cuaron’s third installment in the series proved that they could do well without playing it safe. Lush, ambitious, and packed with design choices that would influence the remaining films in the franchise, Prisoner Of Azkaban still stands as a turning point in one of cinema’s most successful series.

It doesn’t get much better than Harrison Ford and Sean Connery arguing while tied back-to-back in chairs. While it never rose to the heights of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas ended their original Indiana Jones trilogy by pairing two action legends, and sending them both off into the literal sunset in popcorn movie triumph.

At a time when Robert Downey Jr.’s armored Avenger could not have been more popular in the global box office landscape, writer/director Shane Black came in and stripped him back down to his bare essentials. Iron Man 3 was a remarkable movie when it was released, but it’s even more remarkable now in the context of a constantly expanding MCU which could still stand to learn a lot from Black’s entertaining approach.

Make all the too-many-endings jokes you want, but The Return Of The King is still staggering, soaring, epic filmmaking from Peter Jackson and his all-star cast and crew. The film didn’t win 11 Oscars just because it capped a successful trilogy. It won 11 Oscars because it capped a successful trilogy with a moving, gobsmackingly grand finale.

Every entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise has something to offer, but the always blockbuster-friendly J.J. Abrams did something especially effective with the third installment. The dark, high-stakes mission to capture an arms dealer (Philip Seymour Hoffman) provided Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt with new emotional depth, and helped set the table for the increasingly ambitious sequels that followed.

When your series villain is an undead demon who haunts your dreams, you’re allowed to take some chances. Thankfully for all of us, Dream Warriors is a film full of big swings, with an ensemble cast, the return of original Nightmare star Heather Langenkamp, and some of the best kills in the whole franchise. Throw in a killer theme song, and it’s one of the most fun horror flicks of the 1980s.

Though it’s often overshadowed by the films on either side of it in the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock still lands as a thoughtful, impressive sci-fi adventure in its own right. This is a film, after all, that sought to reverse the tragedy of Spock’s death in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, and not only made it feel worth it, but made it feel absolutely essential to the nature of Star Trek from that point forward. That’s quite an achievement.

It might not be the gut punch of The Empire Strikes Back, but as the conclusion of a story about fathers and sons, hope and heartbreak, Return Of The Jedi still works even if you don’t like the Ewoks. From the redemption of Darth Vader to the demise of Jabba the Hutt, it’s wall-to-wall adventure that feels like it expands a world even as it’s wrapping up a narrative.

The Toy Story franchise might still be going, but any ending it devises will never be as perfect as the one that capped the original trilogy. In the dynamic, inventive, and even devastating Toy Story 3, Woody, Buzz, and their friends face evil toys, stare their own deaths in the face, and find a new home in one of animation’s most tearjerking final scenes.

The story of how Alien 3 happened is almost more interesting than the film itself, and that’s a problem. Despite the presence of Sigourney Weaver and the early promise of director David Fincher, the third film in the franchise fails to capture either the haunted house menace of Alien or the war movie mayhem of Aliens, leaving it in a stilted limbo of unfulfilled potential.

There’s some fun to be had with Quantumania’s tale of the Lang/Pym family venturing deep into the Quantum Realm, and Jonathan Majors is terrific as Kang the Conqueror. Still, the film suffers from classic Marvel Studios overreach, expanding in all directions at once until it starts to lose its way.

Joel Schumacher’s inimitable style and sense of camp shine through the weak points in Batman Forever, but the film never quite comes together in the way Tim Burton’s previous two films did. Val Kilmer’s underwhelming work in the title role doesn’t help matters, although watching the film alongside Schumacher’s followup, Batman & Robin, makes Forever look like a masterpiece.

When viewed in the context of the larger Fast Saga, Tokyo Drift is an indispensable piece of worldbuilding that adds a lot to the bigger picture. As a standalone entry, though, while the film has its defenders, it just never rises to the level of many of the films around it. Still, we got Sung Kang’s Han out of the deal, so it was probably worth it.

There’s an operatic, richly textured quality to The Godfather Part III that makes it better than a lot of stuffier dramas and flashier crime films of its era. The problem is that it has the burden of following two absolute masterpieces, and while there’s loads of ambition to be a masterpiece, this film never really gets there. A bit better is Francis Ford Coppola’s 2020 re-cut of the film, which was released with the inelegant and unmemorable title of The Godfather, Coda: The Death Of Michael Corleone.

Carrying on a blockbuster franchise without your original stars is a tricky proposition, and Home Alone 3 is proof that even solid execution can’t always pull you out of that hole. The cast is charming, the premise is far fetched even by Home Alone standards—but still fun—and many of the gags retain John Hughes’ impish playfulness. Without the McCallisters and the Wet Bandits, though, it’s just not the same.

One of the most famous poster children for cinematic cash grabs, Jaws 3-D has a certain obviousness to it in retrospect. Of course someone was going to try to make this movie at some point, but the absence of any original cast members after Jaws 2, the use of SeaWorld as the central location, and the lackluster visual effects all sealed this film’s doom from the start.

The Matrix sequels aren’t as bad as you remember, they just had the misfortune of following the action movie perfection that is The Matrix. With Revolutions, though, something feels especially off, even in its best moments, like a whole trilogy of new films is being shoved into one story. While it never stops giving you new stuff to look at, by the end you’re left overwhelmed and maybe even a bit confused.

At World’s End plays like a classic trilogy-capper in many ways. It’s big, it’s fun, and it looks better than a lot of blockbusters made a decade later. But that doesn’t stop the film from feeling overstuffed and studded with tired jokes that started to show their wear and tear the moment the first movie hit home video. Captain Jack’s weirdness only takes you so far, and At World’s End is proof.

Bringing back Norman Bates for a 20-years-later sequel worked for Psycho II and its often subversive storytelling, but Psycho III misses the mark despite the creative control of director and star Anthony Perkins. There’s still a lot of talent involved, to be sure, but when this film goes back to the original well of Psycho it doesn’t find much there.

Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop is one of the most incisive action movies ever made, a sci-fi spectacle that also says a lot about America in the 1980s. Sequels were inevitable, but by RoboCop 3, Peter Weller had bailed—replaced by a walking jaw whose name we can’t remember—and the shine had really started to wear off the franchise. You can give RoboCop a jetpack, but you can’t replicate the original’s power.

While it set the template for the triumphant Rocky IV, and featured a fearless Mr. T as Clubber Lang, there’s still something about Rocky III that doesn’t quite land. It’s not as grounded as the films that came before it, nor is it as bombastic as the films that came after, leaving it in a kind of middle-of-the-road limbo that’s still entertaining, but winds up feeling like a weak link.

Let’s be clear: Spider-Man 3 is a Sam Raimi movie, so even in its worst moments it’s at the very least interesting. There are even flashes of greatness in there, but after the powerhouse that is Spider-Man 2, this jam-packed, often wobbly third installment was always going to feel like a letdown, even if it did give us Peter Parker dancing.

It’s not that Superman III is a terrible movie. Christopher Reeve is still great in the title role, and while Richard Pryor might feel out of place, he’s still Richard Pryor operating at peak comedic expressiveness. The problem is that the film can’t decide if it wants to be a comedy or a big-spectacle superhero movie and that makes it feel imbalanced, even after the often jagged Superman II.

Like Spider-Man 3, X-Men: The Last Stand has the disadvantage of following one of the best superhero films of its era in X2: X-Men United. And like Spider-Man 3, it’s a film that tries to do too many things, cramming a franchise’s worth of ideas into a single movie. Unlike Spider-Man 3, though, it doesn’t have the visual dynamism and wit of Sam Raimi, which makes it an even rougher example of trilogy fatigue.