Top ten sequels to best picture winners

It's been a minute on this blog since I've sat down to do some sort of top ten list. What was once the bread and butter of this blog has taken the back seat (to mix metaphors) as I have taken a more "catch as catch can" approach to blogging over the past, I don't know, decade. (My second son was born a little more than a decade ago. This could explain it.)

But the release of Gladiator II prompted me to decide to get back in the driver's seat, to return to the second part of my mixed metaphor. (Or to start slathering butter on the bread, to return to the first.)

So I decided to go through and look at all the sequels to best picture winners that I've seen, and decide which were the worthiest and least worthy. Or more correctly, to isolate the worthiest, meaning the least worthy will get shut out of discussion altogether.

Sorry Gladiator II. No spot on this list for you. 

(So if you want substantive discussion of Gladiator II, you can check out my review.) 

I ran into a tricky issue right away. While it would probably not surprise you to know that the vast majority of best picture winners have no sequel, there's one that has -- count 'em -- eight sequels, all of which I've seen. 

How to handle all the offspring of the 1976 best picture winner, Rocky?

Ultimately, I did include them all separately for consideration. If I only included one, I might not get to a top ten at all. 

First, though, just to give you a bit of an idea what we're up against.

I wouldn't say that I am familiar with all the possible sequels that may exist for the more obscure best picture winners. But as far as I can tell, no best picture winner had gotten a sequel until 1944's Going My Way had The Bells of St. Mary's come out the following year. I haven't seen The Bells of St. Mary's, so it won't be up for consideration on this list, and I didn't even know about it until I started research for this post.

It then takes all the way until 1967's In the Heat of the Night for there to be another BP winner to get a sequel, which is They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! -- making it the first BP sequel, chronologically, that I've seen, since I watched it only this year for my Blaxploitaudient series. The phenomenon becomes a little more common after this, but still not especially so. The French Connection in 1971 gets a 1975 sequel, which I also have not seen, and then of course The Godfather follows the next year, and we know what happened there.

One thing to clarify before we get started. I don't consider Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy to function as a sequel to the 2003 best picture winner Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. It's a separate franchise and in any case, it wasn't solely the success of the best picture winner that prompted its existence.

So I have to say I started writing this post before I knew how many options there actually were to choose from. As I have now done that tally, I have seen 15 sequels to best picture winners, more than half of which are Rocky movies. 

So let's just make it a top 15.

15) Rocky V (1990) - The worst Rocky movie is easily the worst best picture sequel (that I've seen). No two ways about it.

14) The Godfather Part III (1990) - Nineteen ninety was a bad year for best picture sequels. It's likely Godfather III is not as bad as I remember, but I'm not eager for a second viewing to find out.

13) Gladiator II (2024) - I have to admit I came in a little biased against this film, because my former colleague at ReelGood told me beforehand that he hated it and would give it a 0/10. Having watched the film, I don't understand where that sort of vitriol comes from except this guy is given to extreme dislike (not so much to extreme like) and that he's younger than I am, so the original Gladiator was a foundational movie for him. But I don't think it's great. 

12) Hannibal (2001) - I remember the first sequel to Silence of the Lambs (I've only seen the two Hannibal Lecter sequels that feature Anthony Hopkins) having some unforgettable material -- like, the appearance of Gary Oldman's Mason Verger is permanently burned into my brain -- but that overall it's a bit all over all the place.

11) Creed II (2018). I'm not sure if the first sequel to Creed (which of course is itself a sequel to Rocky) truly belongs outside my top ten, but I am putting it here in deference to two other films that have just one sequel and therefore likely would have made my top ten, for the sake of variety only, if I had been going for only ten movies. Given my affection for the first Creed, I really wanted to love this movie, but it just pales in comparison.

10) The Evening Star (1996) - One of only two sequels on this list that we would not consider to be part of a franchise. The sequel to Terms of Endearment was fine, as I recall. I think I may have seen it before I saw Terms of Endearment. 

9) They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! (1971) - The other non-franchise sequel. This really has nothing to do with In the Heat of the Night, as it only features the main character, Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), spun out into a blaxploitation progenitor that takes place in San Francisco. It's pretty good, not great.

8) Red Dragon (2002) - I do not have significant memories of the second Silence of the Lambs sequel except that I remember I thought it was better than the first.

7) Creed III (2023) - Creed III may not be four slots better on this list than Creed II in terms of real-world quality, but there's an indistinct middle section here where the difference is negligible between the movies. A slight improvement on Creed II, it still convinced me that we don't need any more Creed movies.

6) Rocky IV (1985) - That this movie ranks as high as it does is an indication of a) how few good best picture sequels there actually are, and b) how this movie has gained in cultural cache over the years. I still think I've only seen it once, and I think about it more for its gloriously absurd extremes than for actually being a good movie.

5) Rocky II (1979) - I only saw this for the first time in the past few years, and in fact, it was the final Rocky movie I saw -- or close to it anyway. (I can't remember if I saw it just before or just after Creed III.) I think this movie gets sort of retrospective respect applied to it because it was the movie that likely allowed this series to continue as long as it has. If the first sequel had not worked, that might have been the end of it. And so it paved the way for three Rocky movies still ahead on this list.

4) Rocky Balboa (2006) - It seems unlikely that the sixth Rocky movie is quite as good as I remember it. After the disaster that was Rocky V, I didn't prioritize seeing this in the theater and eventually caught it on a plane. But I really enjoyed it on that plane, and it might be the Rocky movie I am most interested in revisiting just to interrogate that reaction.

3) The Godfather Part II (1974) - Blasphemy. Utter blasphemy that this would not be #1, you are probably thinking. But here we take a big jump upward to a truly beloved top three. Then again, maybe I can't quite call the second Godfather movie -- itself a best picture winner -- "beloved," which is why it does not beat out the two movies ahead of it. Infamously, the first time my wife and I watched this movie -- neither of us had seen it as recently as the late 2000s -- we watched it out of sequence, putting in the second DVD before the first. I eventually saw it correctly sequenced, but I think by then I had already missed the boat on loving this movie. What can you do. I can only ever give you my true perspective on the movies I see.

2) Creed (2015) - My #2 movie of 2015. I eventually watched this four times, including twice in the theater. It did lose a little bit on each viewing -- not a lot, but a little bit -- so it failed to scale the heights to the top of this list. 

1) Rocky III (1982) - If you put Rocky III and Creed up against each other in a duel on Flickchart, I might pick Creed. In fact, Creed is currently ranked #243 on my Flickchart while Rocky III is at #268, though I suspect they have never actually had a face-to-face duel. Creed is definitely the "better" movie in all the traditional ways you define the craft of cinema. But Rocky III is the movie I watched on repeat on VHS in the mid-1980s, and it has so many beats that I love. Creed will continue to diminish by small amounts if I go much beyond my current four viewings. At 10+ viewings -- though granted, only about one this century -- Rocky III has not yet lost any of its luster. The one this century was enough to confirm that. 

So was it worth writing a post tagged to the release of Gladiator II that just effectively became a ranking of Rocky movies?

Perhaps not, but at least it's done now.

Finishing the Rocky series -- but not with Creed III

I finished the Rocky series on Tuesday night, but the newly released Creed III was not the final piece in the puzzle.

Oh, I did see Creed III, but that was Monday night. You can read my review here.

No, on Tuesday I night, I finally corrected the strangest oversight in any long-running movie series where I've seen the majority of the films. I finally saw Rocky II.

Yes, Rocky II came out in 1979. Yes, that was 44 years ago.

Here's how the oversight happened. 

Rocky III was the movie that came out closest to when I started caring about movies. In 1982 I was still only eight for most of the year, so I didn't see it in the theater -- I'm pretty sure my parents would have thought it was too intense for an eight-year-old, and they would have been right.

But the release of Rocky III was perfectly timed to be available on The Movie Channel a few years later when we got cable. We recorded it on VHS and it quickly became one of my favorite movies, one I have probably watched close to ten times, though probably only once in the past 30 years.

At that point I went forward rather than back, catching the subsequent movies as they released. I only finally broke the chronology in 2013 -- just about a month before leaving for Australia, in fact -- when I went back and watched the original Rocky. Hard to believe that I only watched the original Rocky ten years ago, but it's true. And I gave it five stars. Really connected with me, so to speak. 

You'd imagine that finally seeing Rocky would have put a viewing of Rocky II pretty urgently on my schedule, but that did not happen. I had to watch three Creed movies -- and love the first one in the same neighborhood that I loved Rocky and Rocky III -- before I finally sat down with it on Tuesday night.

I didn't finally put it on the schedule one night after seeing Creed III because that movie left me so jazzed up about boxing movies. If you checked out that review, you've seen that my reaction to Creed III was positive but on the tepid side, a somewhat generous 7/10 on ReelGood's rating scale. 

Rather, I made a claim in the review I had already finished but not yet posted, which was that Rocky and Creed were the two best Rocky movies. (Rocky III figures in there somewhere for me, as the review also states, but I decided I didn't want to die on the hill of calling it the best.) 

It didn't seem fair not to consider Rocky II as a candidate for that honor if I hadn't even seen it.

Well, Rocky II isn't one of my top three Rocky movies, but it did have enough going for it. Like its predecessor, it's a very gritty 1970s film. The first way I noticed this was through its title card. Not the first title card -- which does pan the title across the screen in giant letters -- but the second title card, the one you mightn't have thought was even necessary given the first one. But it looks like this:

That is, of course, not from Rocky II, but from the original Rocky. The internet was not forthcoming on the one from Rocky II.

But it looks exactly like this, though I think the lettering might have been yellow.

A very unassuming choice, especially when you are following a movie that didn't have any pretensions -- making it a justified choice in that movie -- but then blew up as a popular and critical success. A very 70s choice. A very hard hat, lunch pail, working class choice. In fact, I believe the background images are the city as shot from a moving car from a bridge, not dissimilar to the opening credits of the TV show Taxi.

In other words, a very Rocky choice.

I wasn't sure how quickly the tone of the series would pivot from what works so well in Rocky to what works so well, but is very different, in Rocky III. The answer is, pretty slowly. Rocky III is equally light on the boxing scenes, only getting to them at the beginning (establishing the series' tendency to recap what happened at the end of the last movie through exact footage from that movie) and at the end. In between, it's a lot of growing pains, early trappings of fame, mild domestic discord, and training sequences. In other words, good stuff except that Rocky already did that better than this movie could hope to, and in my mind I was hungering for something a bit more like Rocky III.

The quantity of boxing was clearly something the filmmakers sought to correct by the time of the third movie, which features not only the recap of Rocky II at the start, but also the exhibition fight against Thunderlips, the first fight against Clubber Lang, and the second fight against Clubber Lang. Boxing from start to finish is a more exciting way to grow the franchise into the new model for what blockbusters could be. Don't forget that we'd only just really started to become acquainted with this form of blockbuster four years before Rocky II with the release of Jaws, so Hollywood had not yet identified how to lather up such a movie with non-stop action.

I admit I did fall asleep several times during Rocky II -- pausing as I always do -- but that's more a commentary on me than the movie. I always fall asleep, for at least a little bit, during movies I watch at home these days. I'm sure it is impacting my overall experience in some way, but I just haven't found in my new house that perfect balance between comfort and rigidity, the kind of sitting position that keeps me awake but is also relaxing. In the old house, our coach was backed up against a wall, so when I sat on the floor leaning back on it -- my preferred viewing position -- it provided exactly what I need. In this house if I try to do that, and if no one is sitting on the couch to weigh it down, I push it backwards. So instead I sit on it, or lie on it, and well it's pretty easy to guess what will happen from there.

One thing I enjoyed about Rocky II was seeing Rocky's start as a pitchman. When he gains his fame from the bout against Apollo Creed, which he does not win in the first movie, he needless to say comes into a little bit of money, and also is sought after to hawk products. He's so bad at reading his lines, though, that he gets fired by the exasperated director. Which is just as well because he also thinks doing this is shit. He's much better at this by Rocky III.

It's interesting to note that he's also intended to be retired way back at the start of this movie, after his one fight inflicted so much damage on him that his wife Adrian can't stand to watch him continue to take a pummeling. So that means the idea of him being retired is something that was being grappled with as early as the start of the second movie ... and that his retirement doesn't actually take for the full length of five more movies. 

I had wished we'd spend a little more time with Creed. Given that the last three movies in this series have borne his name and been devoted to his legacy in some way, it was useful to spend some more time with him and see how much that feels justified. Of course, in Rocky II he is still just basically a villain, even baiting Rocky to fight him again with cheap insults in the newspaper. In this movie, he's the one living in the fancy house, insecure about his standing within boxing and the controversial result of his fight with Rocky. Creed wouldn't become the beloved figure so mourned in the three Creed movies until Rocky III, and then of course especially in Rocky IV, so seeing him here really wasn't that instructive. 

There's also a long sub plot about Adrian going into a coma while she's pregnant -- at least I think I've got that right. This is where I was dozing off a bit.

I did find the final fight pretty rousing, but I realized I already knew its main beats -- from the start of Rocky III. So yeah, I'd already seen Rocky over-punch on his last swing of the match, leading him to lose his balance as both he and Apollo fall to the mat at the same time. Only Rocky gets up. It's a sufficiently epic climax to a boxing match, but I'd already seen it so it didn't hold any surprise for me.

I say that I have now completed the Rocky series, but is that really true? 

Apparently, it is not true.

Although I said Creed III was the time to end things in my review, that may have been more wishful thinking than Hollywood reality. Perhaps I thought Michael B. Jordan et al would show the restraint that previous Rocky movies have never shown, even though I had no reason to assume that. I mean, Adonis Creed is actually retired at the start of Creed III. Perhaps I didn't think it was possible for two different Creed movies to start with him as retired, because it would just be too silly. Then again, when has a character being too old ever stopped Hollywood before? We're preparing for the next Indiana Jones movie this summer.

But yes, Michael B. Jordan has confirmed -- perhaps hot off the box office success of this movie -- that Creed IV is already in the works. It's true there are storylines they have not yet explored. Spoilers for Creed III, but Adonis Creed has not yet lost a fight while holding the championship belt. In other words, he hasn't had his Rocky III lowest moment.

So all I can say is that I'm a Rocky Cinematic Universe completist for now. Who knows, maybe the only way for Adonis to fully shake off the baggage of his father and his former trainer is to end up appearing in more RCU movies than either of them.