The 10 Greatest Movie Trilogies That Don’t Have a Single Bad Film
Making one great film is an extraordinary challenge. Making three great ones in a row feels impossible, at least that’s how many audiences believe. The rule of thumb in the film world is that the first movie in a series or franchise is always the best, based on the principle of it being original and inventive, while the sequel is generally underwhelming. By the time you make a third or fourth installment, the creators are merely getting desperate. However, there are plenty of exceptional movie trilogies, especially ones envisioned by a singular voice and have a connective tissue between each entry, that have a high batting average.
Popular to contrary belief, we can count at least 10 trilogies that feature, as they say, no skips, all bangers. Listed below are the 10 film trilogies without a single bad movie.
10
‘The Dark Knight’ Trilogy (2005-2012)
There were comic book movies before The Dark Knight trilogy, and there are comic book movies in its wake. The release of Christopher Nolan‘s gritty and grounded take on Batman is a clear line of demarcation for the now ubiquitous genre. With Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan brought a newfound degree of craft and sophistication to the art of superhero narratives, elevating them as modern-day mythology.
With the Caped Crusader getting bloated and goofy in Batman & Robin, Nolan stripped down the DC Comics character as a picaresque hero’s origin journey in Batman Begins, the first on-screen portrait of the character that focused on Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) as a three-dimensional, lived-in character. The director took his sequel, The Dark Knight, which works as a stand-alone effort, to extraordinary heights by turning Batman’s saga against the Joker (Heath Ledger) into an operatic crime story akin to Michael Mann. While The Dark Knight Rises is messy and unfocused, its grandeur and go-for-broke ambition are lost on comic book movies today.
9
‘Back to the Future’ (1985-1990)
When you think about it, Back to the Future has a bonkers premise. However, you never think of it as ludicrous, based on the impeccable craft and execution of Robert Zemeckis‘ 1985 all-time classic, arguably the perfect blockbuster. A film combining high school comedy, science fiction, and action-adventure, Back to the Future pays out like a slot machine every time you watch it, as Zemeckis and Bob Gale‘s ability to connect all the plot points, from Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) getting his parents to fall in love and travel back to the present day, is miraculous, and relentlessly entertaining and charming.
The sequels, while not as groundbreaking or inventive, are nonetheless grand old times. Back to the Future Part II is both a prescient and erroneous portrait of what the year 2015 will look like, and Back to the Future Part III is light on franchise lore but heavy on Western homages and classic Hollywood romanticism. These two installments feel minor, but as long as Zemeckis gets to run wild with special effects and elaborate narratives in movies, they’re always a blast.
8
‘The Evil Dead’ (1981-1992)
Despite having a minimal budget and limited resources, Sam Raimi made a horror classic as his feature directorial debut, The Evil Dead. A familiar brand of supernatural, forest-set schlock-fest, Raimi separated this cult classic and franchise-starter by unlocking new ways to move the camera and create an unforgettable, disorienting effect that blurred the line between farce and sheer terror.
With the groundbreaking sequel, Evil Dead II, Raimi topped himself by leaning heavily into the absurdist, zany comedy of the story of a cursed book wreaking havoc on a tiny cabin in the woods. This beloved sequel also minted Bruce Campbell, playing the wisecracking, chainsaw-wielding Ash Williams, as an icon. The series may have gotten less scary as it went along, but that doesn’t mean they were any less bombastic. The finale, Army of Darkness, sees Raimi elevating his style to a time-traveling action-comedy extravaganza. Whether by giving you the creeps or causing you to laugh hysterically at Ash’s constant punishment, The Evil Dead series hits your emotional core.
7
‘The Godfather’ (1972-1990)
Considering that this trilogy features two films widely considered the finest achievements in cinema history, it’s hard to ignore The Godfather as a legendary series. The 1972 film by Francis Ford Coppola redefined film language thematically and visually and spawned a generation of iconic stars like Al Pacino, James Caan, and Robert Duvall. Miraculously, Coppola arguably topped himself two years later with The Godfather: Part II, an astounding tale of family evolution and morality, which introduced Robert De Niro to a mass audience.
You could watch all three in succession and comprehend the arc of living under capitalism and the myths of the American Dream.
We all know The Godfather: Part III (which Coppola has since re-cut into The Death of Michael Corleone) doesn’t hold a candle to its predecessors. While its flaws are unmistakable, Coppola’s return to the Corleone family is an insightful look into aging, regret, and reconciliation—fundamental aspects of the criminal underworld. Across nearly 20 years, we see the evolution of Michael Corleone as an innocent war hero who is lured into his father’s empire, only to suffer from the grave consequences of his greed for power. You could watch all three in succession and comprehend the arc of living under capitalism and the myths of the American Dream.
6
Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy (2004-2013)
While never officially declared a series, Edgar Wright‘s Cornetto trilogy is a trilogy in spirit. The only thing connecting Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End is the recurring presence of the British ice cream cone, Cornetto. Although each film featured Wright as director and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as co-stars, they share no lore or storylines. However, the saga of Cornetto flavors represents the holy trinity of Wright’s unmistakable style and energy, defined by rapid-fire editing, a freewheeling camera, and parody homage to classic genre movies made with the craft of a blockbuster.
Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End are fresh, postmodern takes on zombie horror, cop thrillers, and alien invasion science fiction, respectively, but they all belong to their own unique genre that only Wright can master. Depending on what mood you’re in, any one of them will be a blast as you watch Pegg and Frost’s slacker characters turn into unlikely heroes. With all three films providing action, comedy, and commentary on British culture and society, Dead, Fuzz, and World’s End are each full meals, making the trilogy a day’s worth of consumption.
5
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s ‘Three Colours’ Trilogy (1993-1994)
Commercial cinema is not the place to find sequels, as the arthouse landscape is blessed with its own coveted trilogy of films by Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Similar to the Cornetto trilogy (purposefully riffing on Kieślowski‘s series), Three Colours: Blue, Three Colours: White, and Three Colours: Red share no narrative connective tissue, but they each deal with overarching themes surrounding French Revolutionary ideals and match each other in tone as probing psychological dramas.
Starring venerated French actors like Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, and Jean-Louis Trintignant, the Three Colours trilogy, named after the colors of the country’s flag, takes viewers through an odyssey of France’s doctrines that are supposed to define the nation: liberty, equality, and fraternity. Kieślowski places you in sobering, humorous, and deeply humane circumstances, where characters grapple with love and death. Despite its lofty premise, each Three Colours film handles its respective theme with accessible cinematic language and story structure. Rather than through story, Kieślowski ties all the colors together through symbolic images and repeated gestures. On an emotional scale, the trilogy operates as one whole vision.
4
Richard Linklater’s ‘Before’ Trilogy (1995-2013)
Being a director fascinated by time and the evolution of relationships, Richard Linklater was destined to serialize movies, even if it wasn’t in the commercial franchise enterprise. What would a relationship, one that began as a meet-cute on a train headed to Vienna in Before Sunrise, across three decades, look like? While Linklater tracked the arc of childhood to adulthood across 12 years with Boyhood, Linklater and stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy returned to capture another incidental encounter between Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy) in Paris, and the eventual turbulence of their marriage in Before Sunset and Before Midnight, respectively.
The Before trilogy was a bold prospect, but due to Linklater’s minimalist, dialogue-focused filmmaking, this experiment plays out more like an intimate documentary. Each entry reflects Linklater’s personal state and interpretation of romance, starting with the naive idealism of Sunrise and concluding with the harsh realities of relationships in Midnight, with Sunset being a powerful inflection point in life that everyone must face. On their own, each film feels like embarking on a meditative and enriching vacation, rounded out by striking photography of the natural land and scintillating chemistry between Hawke and Delpy.
3
Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” Spaghetti Westerns (1964-1966)
By the 1960s, American audiences were well aware of the iconography and tropes of the Western genre that dominated the previous decade. While John Wayne and John Ford shaped our image of the American frontier, Italian director Sergio Leone paid homage to American Westerns while also inverting the genre on its head with his spiritual trilogy of spaghetti Westerns, A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The series, colloquially known as the Dollars trilogy, once seen as an underground, trashier take on the Hollywood staple, has come to define a subgenre.
The Dollars trilogy, most notably, birthed the star persona of Clint Eastwood, who brought his husky, gravelly voice and piercing scowl to America by the end of the decade, becoming the new face of the Western and the anti-heroic outlaw. Eastwood’s lonesome bounty hunter drew on the Japanese samurai to create our modern interpretation of the Western protagonist—a deadly but morally righteous wolf wandering the open country. Beginning with the low-stakes thrills of A Fistful of Dollars to the epic proportions of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (with the overlooked For a Few Dollars More being the perfect blend of B-Westerns and revisionist Westerns), Leone’s movies are light on narrative cohesion, but their impeccable style and rule-breaking formalism are all one singular vision.
2
Original ‘Star Wars’ (1977–1983)
Star Wars has evolved into such an expansive universe and galaxy-sized enterprise that it’s easy to forget its humble roots as a weird, bold experiment by George Lucas in 1977. Following the global phenomenon of the original film (colloquially now recognized as A New Hope) in the now 10-movie franchise, two sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, continued the story of the rebel alliance versus the empire and hero’s arc of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill).
For some purists, the Star Wars saga concluded in 1983 with Return of the Jedi. Unlike the divisiveness and constant quarreling over the prequels and Disney-produced sequels, the original trilogy is refreshingly quaint, magical, and wholly satisfying. Each installment is defined by its own emotional tenor and visual aesthetic, with The Empire Strikes Back being the downbeat fulcrum point between A New Hope and Jedi, groundbreaking works of escapist, spectacle-driven cinema.
1
‘Lord of the Rings’ (2001–2003)
Adapting a fantasy book series was already quite the gambit for New Line Cinema. Handing it off to a relatively unknown director in Peter Jackson and allowing him to film each entry concurrently seemed reckless. One of the boldest swings that ever paid off in film history, Jackson’s cinematic treatment of The Lord of the Rings, based on the books by J. R. R. Tolkien, was a triumph that defined the 21st century. Each film, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, was a box office hit and Best Picture nominee, with the conclusion sweeping the Oscars.
Often cited as the best trilogy in film history, The Lord of the Rings capitalizes on the magnitude of the cinematic form by capturing the beautiful fields and plains of New Zealand with breathtaking grandeur. While each film is closely linked in this long, epic saga of the battle for power in Middle-earth, Fellowship, The Two Towers, and King all stand on their own as individualistic expressions on Jackson’s part. You could argue for anyone being your favorite, and no one would bat an eye.
- Release Date
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December 19, 2001
- Runtime
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178 Minutes
- Writers
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Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, J.R.R. Tolkien
- Producers
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Barrie M. Osborne, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein, Mark Ordesky, Robert Shaye, Tim Sanders
