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.

Epic lines from lame movies

Last night I was at Cinema Nova watching Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor (review here), and I saw a trailer for the re-release of the god-awful Godfather Part III.

Why anyone needs to reconsider/reevaluate this movie, just because it happens to be turning 30 years old, is beyond me. I'm sure it's some lame attempt to elevate the film's reputation through putting lipstick on a pig, as the unfortunate saying goes. A new cut of the film? Changing the title to Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone? None of it will change the essentially rancid flavor emitted from that film.

But I'm not writing about it today to complain about the decision to re-release it. Re-release whatever you want, I really don't care.

It's that it made me realize that possibly the most famous line of dialogue from the entire Godfather series actually comes from this movie.

You could choose a couple other lines from the series that have a lot of pop culture prominence, like "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse," or "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes," or "I know it was you, Fredo."

But the first line I ever knew from a Godfather movie was  "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

I believe it was my college roommate, Al, who first used it in my presence. I can see him doing the Michael Corleone impression, with the clawed hands gesture imitating a person being pulled back in. And this was years before I had seen any Godfather movie. This would have been about 1994, and I didn't see the original Godfather until the early 2000s. 

However, Al was just the first. This was a meme before memes existed, a quotation people liked to apply to any situaton where they had hoped to extract themselves, only to find themselves still mired in whatever quagmire it was they wanted to get out of. In fact, a friend of mine used it just last week in my presence. (Over Zoom, but still, "in my presence.")

Knowing that this was Michael Corleone, I assumed the line came from either The Godfather or The Godfather Part II -- you know, the only two Godfather movies anyone actually likes. In fact, I think I went so far as to look for them when I first watched those movies. I didn't have to wait long to find the line after not seeing it in The Godfather Part II, as we watched The Godfather Part III the next night as the end to a three-night Godfather weekend.

I must have acknowledged that the line came from the third movie at the time, but that was almost 15 years ago, so I've blocked out a lot of that movie. Who knows, maybe it's not even as bad as I remember it.

In a way it makes sense. I mean, Michael is not actually trying to "get out" in the first two movies. It's only in the third movie that he tries to go legit. So that line wouldn't have made any sense before 1990.

But I guess the timing of it is funny. Some lines of dialogue feel like they have been around for years, when they are actually comparatively new. That would have been the case with this one. When Al quoted that line to me -- if it was, indeed, the first time -- it would have been only four years after the movie originally came out. Yet it was referenced in the way you'd reference one of the classic lines of cinema, that had been around for decades.

I'd accuse Al of bad movie taste, but not by a long shot is he the only one who has tried to get out and been pulled back in over the years. Others have repeatedly endorsed this line and elevated to, I don't know, maybe even one of the hundred most recognizable cinematic quotations of all time? Is it possible it is that well known?

Because this whole phenomenon felt somewhat familiar from my own writings, I researched it the best I could (using my tag "quotations") and found that I wrote about a similar phenomenon back in 2015. That was about a line in Poltergeist II ("They're baaaAAAAaaack") that had inexplicably found greater pop culture endurance than the line it was playing off from the original ("They're heeeEEEEeere"). 

Maybe we should just follow the logic of my former co-worker Jason, who waved off the Back to the Future movies as "all the same," as though the first were not orders of magnitude better than the second and third. Although that was a ridiculous viewpoint, maybe there was a hidden logic to it. Maybe when we make references like Al Pacino's "pull me back in" line, we are really referencing a whole franchise, and the beloved characters in it, rather than re-litigating the strengths and weaknesses of any one film. 

Hey, I'm sure Pacino didn't want to be in a sub-par third Godfather movie. If he managed to wring from the experience an epic line of dialogue, more power to him. 

My first properly sequenced Godfather II viewing

If I had had a blog at the time, I would raked myself over the coals for what I'm about to tell you.

But my first viewing of The Godfather Part II came about six months before I started documenting my movie thoughts on The Audient. That was June of 2008. I was 34 at the time, so that was already pretty late in the viewing career of a cinephile like me to be seeing this movie for the first time.

To correct the long-time oversight, and to watch the infamous third movie in the series for the first time as well, my wife and I planned a themed viewing weekend. We watched The Godfather (which we'd both already seen) on Friday night with a pasta dish one of us made. We watched its sequel (which she hadn't seen either) on Saturday night with a pasta dish made by the other. And we watched The Godfather Part III on Sunday night with delivery pizza. I hope it was bad delivery pizza, so that the quality of the dinners mirrored the quality of the movies.

Except we screwed up watching the second movie. And we screwed it up in a way that, it appears, I've never revealed on this blog in 11 and a half years of its existence, despite it being a great story and despite my confessional nature.

We watched the second disc first.

How is this possible, you ask? How can you start a movie two hours into its running time and not realize that this is what had happened?

It still seems incredible today, but I'll try to set the scene.

I can't blame having too much wine, I guess, since I think we ate while watching the movie. Unless I dipped into it before we started, but that wouldn't have been like me. If I knew I had three hours and 20 minutes of movie ahead of me, I would have known I couldn't stack the deck against myself with too much alcohol -- even at the comparatively vigorous age of 34.

So I guess, when disc 2 went into the DVD player rather than disc 1, we must have both thought the apparent abruptness to the start of the movie was just a strange, minimalist intro into the action. The Lake Tahoe setting was not a carryover from the first movie, so starting in winter, rather than at the outdoor festival where the movie actually starts, was only a little stranger than what I would have otherwise experienced.

The weird part is that we did not, after about 20 minutes, decide that something was wrong. We watched all the way until the closing credits, which came at about an hour and ten minutes of disc 2. Again, some of this material might have struck us as more befitting of the second half of a movie than its first. But we also knew this was a beloved film, and beloved films are often rule-breakers. Maybe the apparent disorientation of it was part of its greatness.

Once we realized what had happened, we shook our heads, smacked our foreheads, and started over at the beginning.

It was possible to recognize The Godfather Part II as quite an achievement even when viewing it out of sequence. In fact, given that it takes place in two different time periods, you could say it's out of sequence to begin with, in a manner of speaking.

However, the fact that I didn't love it -- just as I still don't love The Godfather after two viewings -- would probably continue to nag at me. It meant I could never be sure whether the strange circumstances of my first viewing played a significant role in my feelings about the movie, or whether the Godfather movies were just never going to be special favorites of mine.

Never, that is, until I budgeted that three hours and 20 minutes again, to give it another shot.

It took a dozen years, but it finally happened on Sunday.

The occasion was that they have started to ease some pandemic restrictions here in the great state of Victoria. The national COVID death toll is still under 100 -- sitting at 99 today, out of a 25.5 million population -- so we are cautiously putting our toes back in the water of social interaction. My sister-in-law was excited to take the kids for the day. It would have been an overnight, but that is not yet part of the permitted activities. (I don't understand what coronavirus you can get from an overnight visit that you couldn't get from a five-minute interaction, but I'm also not a scientist.)

It was a beautiful day, but I had already expended my outdoor activity on a 45-minute run. Which left me without the energy or the desire to bask in the increasingly less regular sunshine as we head into winter.

Couch? Yes.

In fact, I had specifically decided that I intended to watch something long, something I couldn't take down on an ordinary weeknight, but didn't initially have a candidate in mind. Then I remembered The Godfather II, still sitting in a flip folder among all the other discs I brought with me from America back in 2013. Only the next day I would discover it was available for streaming on Stan, but there seemed something correct about watching the same two DVDs that had flummoxed me 12 years ago.

Thoughts? I thought you'd never ask.

I get why everyone loves this movie without still fully loving it myself. I'll try to articulate my complaints, even if some are minor.

1) I'm not sure how well the two narratives speak to each other, nor how well they are interspersed with one another. Although I am not privy to the thinking of Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo at the time -- though I could probably get so on the internet if I wanted -- it strikes me that the decision to tell a prequel story about the deceased Vito Corleone grew out of the belief that he was the most interesting character in these movies, and a sequel could not survive without his presence. It seems like the better reason to include such a story is to show how he bequeathed his own traits as a mob boss to his son, Michael, and his story does sort of accomplish that. But maybe I needed the comparison to be more on the nose, as I don't really see that much in Michael that reminds me of Vito, and vice versa. I also felt that Vito's story was abandoned for really long stretches of time, sometimes as long as 45 minutes. So while I like and am engaged by both stories, they feel more like two movies smashed together than stories that demanded to be told in the same 200-minute package.

A funny thing did occur to me, though, and it gets at something universal about the impulse to tell a prequel story about a beloved character. Vito Corleone gets his surname because an Ellis Island immigration officer misreads his documents, believing Corleone to be his name rather than his region of origin in Italy. I couldn't help but think of a similar scene in a movie that came nearly 45 years later, as the young Han Solo gets his own surname as a result of an imperial officer assigning it to him. Fan service was a thing even back in 1974, though I'm sure none of the people involved would characterize it that way.

2) If the movie was really 200 minutes long, why is there so little room for Diane Keaton's Kay? If memory serves, she's a far more significant character in the original Godfather, but she's really sidelined here. I may be using Martin Scorsese's gangster movies as a bit of an unfair gauge, but I don't see Goodfellas or Casino as the same movies if Karen (Lorraine Bracco) and Ginger (Sharon Stone) don't have plenty of screen time to impact the character arcs of the movies' male protagonists. Here, Kay gets an early scene to complain about not being able to leave the Lake Tahoe compound after the assassination attempt, and a later scene in which she gets to explain why she's leaving Michael. Although I remember from the original that the relationship started deteriorating from the end of that movie, I felt like it would have behoved Coppola to check in with her more regularly here, so her decision to leave would not feel so abrupt.

3) There's something about the movie's core conflicts that I still don't quite grok. Why did Hyman Roth want Michael out of the way? That is not clear to me. In fact, maybe I missed a bit of dialogue somewhere, but when he goes to visit Roth, it seems to me that he believes Frank Pentangeli was responsible for the assassination attempt. In fact, either he knows Roth's involvement and is playing Roth in that scene, or he learns it later, but then if it's the latter, the moment he learns it does not come as the kind of revelation I was expecting. I was also unclear about why he flies Fredo to Cuba with a briefcase containing $2 million, only to not give it to Roth -- even though, if my memory of a movie I saw two days ago serves, he does not discover Fredo's involvement until after he decides not to give the briefcase to Roth. What changed his mind?

Some of these questions might be able to be answered within the text, but even when paying full attention in the middle of a Sunday afternoon -- pausing to nap at one point, but not missing any of the action -- I couldn't get what I thought were solid answers. I can't fully give myself over to a movie if I've still got nagging complaints like these ones.

I guess there's also something about this movie that does not make it "seem like a Godfather movie." I know that's a weird thing to suggest when there had only been one other. But I felt like the New York settings of the original seem more true to what I think of as "a Godfather movie" than the Lake Tahoe and Cuba settings.

So yeah, I think I do like the original better, but since I have similar reservations about the original, this may just not be my series. It's not heresy to like the original better than the sequel, but having the reservations I have about both of them probably is.

I will say that the end of the second movie left my longing to again watch the third, even knowing how bad it is, since the end of Godfather II so clearly feels like a pause rather than an ending. It also made me wonder why there was such a long delay between the second and the third.

Well, it too is streaming on Stan, so I might have my chance -- if I really want it.

What do I have to be embarrassed about?

I'm sure there are many questions I'd like to ask Roger Ebert, but one has always interested me more than the others -- not because it would produce the most profound answer, but because I bet he doesn't get asked it very often, and it would be really interesting to hear what his answer was. That question is:

"What's the most prominent film you haven't seen?"

Or, phrased in a way that would seem slightly more judgmental, so I probably wouldn't ask it this way:

"What are you most embarrassed about never having seen?"

I've made it a point to always have an answer to this question myself. For the longest time, the answer was Casablanca. Then I finally saw Casablanca about five years ago, removing that shame from my movie-watching record. In fact, I considered it such a big deal to finally be seeing Casablanca that I scheduled it as the 2,000th movie I'd ever seen.

It's been a busy five years, and I am now up over 3,000. In that time I also saw The Godfather Part II, which next took over the mantle of "most prominent film I haven't seen." That viewing came to fruition in June of 2008, again as a "special occasion" -- my wife and I had a Godfather weekend in which we watched The Godfather on Friday night, and she made an Italian dinner; The Godfather Part II on Saturday night, and I made an Italian dinner; and The Godfather Part III on Sunday night, when we just ordered a pizza. Fun weekend, and somehow we also managed to sandwich in a yard sale Saturday morning. Just thinking about that now exhausts me.

So then it was Ben-Hur. But I saw Ben-Hur last month.

I'm having a bit of trouble choosing the next one in line, so I need your help.

I've dug up ten potential candidates to be the next classic I'm most embarrassed about never having seen. I scanned my Flickchart list of the top 500 movies I haven't seen to come up with these results, so I hope they're the best ten. You'd think it should just be the first ten movies on that list, but the term "best" is determined by what the users have ranked the highest. And it just so happens Flickchart has a lot of young users who must think that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the best movie ever made, because that tops the list. Needless to say, I skipped over that. In fact, I'm going to limit this list to films that are at least 20 years old, in part because age helps determine a film's status as a classic, and in part because I probably have seen the most important movies to come out in the last 20 years.

So I'll list these ten in alphabetical order, so as not to bias you, and include a short comment with each. The one that gets the most votes in my comments section will officially become the new holder of this title.

I don't usually specifically ask for audience participation from you guys, but I'd really love it now. So if you're reading this, please chime in.

Okay, they are:

1) Gandhi (1982, Richard Attenborough). I know I've seen part of Gandhi, but it was such a short part that it certainly doesn't qualify. I am certainly looking forward to seeing it, especially as I continue to tick movies off the list of best picture winners I haven't seen. But carving out the 195 minutes to see it seems hard.

2) The Last Emperor (1987, Bernardo Bertolucci). Yikes. This one's actually 225 minutes. But this film has always seemed iconic to me because it came out right around the time I was really getting interested in the Oscars, and I remember being impressed that it won all nine statues for which it was nominated. (Actually, the 225-minute version is the TV miniseries that was later released. The theatrical version, which is the one I'd undoubtedly want to see, was actually only 160.)

3) Mary Poppins (1964, Robert Stevenson). I guess I didn't have any Mary Poppins lovers in my life when I was growing up, because of the two Julie Andrews musical classics, The Sound of Music was the one I saw -- at least twice. I'd love to see this because as I was watching, I bet I'd be surprised at how many songs there were that I didn't realize were from this movie/show.

4) My Fair Lady (1964, George Cukor). Wow, this came out the same year as Mary Poppins? What the hell was I doing in 1964? (Answer: Waiting another nine years to be born.) Like in Poppins, this film contains a number of songs I would either not know or forget were from this movie. Maybe I need to have a Mary Poppins/My Fair Lady double feature some day. (Funnily enough, Poppins' Julie Andrews originated the role of Eliza Doolittle on Broadway, but the producers thought she wasn't bankable enough for the film version because she wasn't known beyond Broadway at the time.)

5) Platoon (1986, Oliver Stone). So this makes four best picture winners of the five listed so far. I know I've seen parts of Platoon, and I once had an internal debate with myself about whether I'd seen the whole thing. The side that thought I hadn't seen the whole thing won out.

6) Rocky (1976, John G. Avildsen). This may be the oddest one on this list because Rocky III was one of the movies I watched most when I was a kid -- I've probably seen it ten times. I've seen every Rocky movie that came out since then, even Rocky Balboa (which was actually good), but I still haven't seen the original Rocky, or Rocky II for that matter. You'd think I would have sought them out at some point, but when I was at that age, I must have thought Rocky looked really dated, and besides, it didn't have either Mr. T or Hulk Hogan in it. (Five out of six best picture winners.)

7) Spartacus (1960, Stanley Kubrick). How is it that I don't consciously know that Stanley Kubrick directed Spartacus? Talk about embarrassing ... Anyway, I always thought that Spartacus was in the same category as Ben-Hur, so this would be an appropriate successor in that sense. Gotta see that scene where everybody claims to be Spartacus -- it's iconic.

8) Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder). I should have seen this for the classic quotes alone: "Alright Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up." "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." I absolutely love All About Eve, and I think of this movie in the same category, so yeah, I bet I'll like it.

9) The Ten Commandments (1956, Cecil DeMille). Speaking of Mr. DeMille ... This has a Ben-Hur connection also in the sense that it stars Charlton Heston, in one of his three most iconic roles (along with Hur and Planet of the Apes). At 219 minutes, though, The Ten Commandments could take me ten days to finish.

10) West Side Story (1961, Robert Wise). And that makes six best picture winners out of the ten. I should have a special fondness for West Side Story, since it was the show my high school put on when I was still in junior high, which got me excited about doing high school drama. (Strangely enough, I decided to do basketball my freshman year, which conflicted with the musical, thereby missing my chance to be in Fiddler on the Roof, which holds a similar dear place in my heart and which I also have not seen in its movie form. The musicals I did do my sophomore, junior and senior years were nowhere near as iconic -- Once Upon a Mattress, The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Good Woman of Setzuan.)

So which one is it? I'm awaiting your responses with bated breath.

So go ahead -- embarrass me.