The greatest sequel in cinema history, according to science
Death, taxes, and a hit movie getting a sequel are three of life’s absolutes. It wasn’t always this way, but when studios realised that the most efficient way of maximising profits was to cultivate a brand that did booming repeat business, an industry-wide shift occurred that’s been standard practice ever since.
Of course, sequels didn’t suddenly arrive as a newfangled concept in the 1980s, but that was when they really took off. Before that, only certain properties and films told their stories over multiple instalments, whereas now viewers are told before the first chapter has even been released that there will be at least two more on the way.
That doesn’t always happen, as so many failed franchise launchers have discovered to their detriment, but the sequel craze will never die out so long as everyone keeps watching them. How many of the 50 highest-grossing releases in cinema history are direct follow-ups to a previous movie or part of an interconnected universe? The answer is 43, which says it all.
Obviously, not every sequel is a shameless and cynical cash-grab, but neither can it be denied that The Godfather Part II and Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 exist in the same bracket. Which one gets to be called the best of all time, though? It’s a difficult question to answer, which is where science handily comes in.
By combining an average critic and user-generated review score across multiple platforms, tying it to box office success, and then weighing it against awards season recognition, Stat Significant developed a model that would separate The Empire Strikes Back from Son of the Mask and offer an analytical insight into the one sequel to rule them all, which has probably given the game away a little bit.
With a box office tally north of a billion dollars, a status as one of the most widely acclaimed epics ever committed to celluloid, and a record-tying return of 11 Academy Awards – not to mention its status as the only one of the three alongside Ben-Hur and Titanic to complete a clean sweep by winning all of the Oscars it was nominated for – Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King takes top honours.
History is littered with seminal sequels, but it’s hard to try and argue against Jackson’s trilogy capper. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a monumental undertaking from an artistic, creative, and technical perspective, and the trio combined to form one of cinema’s finest long-form stories.
To illustrate that point, what did science declare as the second-greatest sequel of all time? The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, underlining the JRR Tolkien adaptations as the benchmark for how to build a franchise that succeeds on all fronts.
