Movies like Back to the Future, Jaws, Halloween, Jurassic Park, Home Alone, Scream, The Matrix, Die Hard, and Pirates of the Caribbean all had strong first installments. While some sequels were good, or even excellent, the original movies usually captured the idea best. It’s unusual for a sequel to be as good as—or even rival—the first film, like The Godfather Part II, Aliens, or Terminator 2: Judgment Day. However, those franchises stand out because their follow-up movies were also truly exceptional.
The later movies in the series were actually even stronger than the first one. While not every sequel is better, overall the series consistently gets better as it goes on.
3) The Wolverine Trilogy
The first X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie was widely considered a failure, so it’s understandable that the subsequent films improved. However, the significant leap in quality between the first and second movies was still unexpected.
The improvement in these films really started when James Mangold joined the project. He did a fantastic job with The Wolverine, and thankfully came back to direct Logan. Logan was a more serious and impactful superhero story with genuine consequences, and it gave Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine the powerful and fitting ending the character deserved.
2) Mission: Impossible
As we touched on earlier, these movie series don’t always improve with each new film. A good example is Mission: Impossible II, which is widely considered the worst in the series. However, after that film, the quality steadily improved.
While Mission: Impossible III showed promise, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol really defined the future of the series. The four films that followed all felt similar in style to Ghost Protocol, and the series consistently improved with each installment. Mission: Impossible – Fallout was the high point, but even the later movies were solid. Each film built on the last, creating an impressive and escalating series of action movies.
1) John Wick
The John Wick movies have consistently improved, and it’s all thanks to their incredible world-building. It’s hard to think of another franchise that has taken a basic idea and created such a detailed and immersive world around it.
Despite the fourth film, we still don’t know much more about John Wick as a person than we did in the first movie. However, we get a much clearer picture of the incredibly detailed and complex world of assassins he inhabits. This world is filled with diverse groups, each with unique methods, but all bound by a strict code of conduct. Violating that code – even something as simple as conducting business in a certain location – can have deadly consequences. The world-building is so effective that it’s easy to become completely immersed in this dark and intricate version of our own reality.
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2026-01-26 21:12