The best film prequels of all time

head-on photo of Robert De Niro in a suit on the streets of New York. he is playing a young Vito Corleone in 'The Godfather Part II.'

Robert De Niro won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Vito Corleone

(Image credit: Michael Ochs Archives / Handout / Getty Images)

published 15 July 2025

It might seem like Hollywood is newly awash in reboots, sequels and prequels. But studios have been using this formula for decades. Prequels are a gamble: Will audiences want to spend several hours getting more information about events they are already familiar with? Sometimes, prequels seem like the last gasp of a franchise that is out of ideas, but occasionally they manage to establish themselves as revered pieces of standalone entertainment.

'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' (1966)

The third and final entry in director Sergio Leone's spaghetti western trilogy is also an origin story for Clint Eastwood's quip-dropping "Blondie." Set in the Southwest during the Civil War, Blondie and fellow bandit Tuco (Eli Wallach) bury a grudge and race to find buried Confederate treasure. Near the end of the movie, Blondie finds and puts on the poncho he made famous in "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964) and "For a Few Dollars More" (1965). Leone's prequel "builds his great film on the rubbish of Western movie cliches, using style to elevate dreck into art," said Roger Ebert.

The second installment in director Francis Ford Coppola's celebrated "Godfather" mafia trilogy is "one of the best movies of all time" because it is a "sequel that not only continues or expands upon the former but is in active conversation with it," said Film School Rejects. The movie is also uniquely constructed as both a sequel and a prequel, with one narrative that builds on the story from "The Godfather" and a second that traces the rise of a young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) decades prior to the events of the first film. The resulting masterpiece is frequently featured on lists of the best movies of all time.

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Perhaps the best sequels are the most subtle. The fifth entry in the "Final Destination" series proceeds more or less like all the rest, with a cast of attractive, forgettable actors escaping a disaster (this time a bridge collapse) when one of them has a premonition of doom — then getting picked off one by one because they "cheated death." An out-of-nowhere twist at the end of the movie makes it clear that "Final Destination 5" is actually a prequel. The film "returns the series to its past glory" as it "solidifies the franchise's themes about inescapable fate," said Den of Geek.

An apocalypse horror movie about blind, long-limbed aliens who hunt humans by sound seems like an unlikely recipe for a blockbuster, but "A Quiet Place" was a huge smash by genre standards. In the third installment, the filmmakers go back to the day the aliens arrived, seen through the eyes of terminally ill Sammy (Lupita Nyong'o) who gets caught in the city along with other hospice patients when disaster strikes. A "near perfect film," the movie works by adding an "emotional layer that makes the film both scarier and more poignant," said Forbes.

Given the enduring prominence of the classic 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz" in pop culture, it is a bit shocking that it was given only one obscure live-action sequel, 1985's "Return to Oz." While "Wicked" isn't the first Oz prequel — 2013's "Oz: the Great and Powerful" did well at the box office — "Wicked" is based on a popular Broadway musical and is the origin story for Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), the Wicked Witch of the West, and her college rival, Galinda, (pop star Ariana Grande), who becomes Glinda the Good. The film is "splashy, largely diverting, tonally discordant and unconscionably long," said The New York Times. "Wicked" was a massive box office smash, and part two is set to be released in November 2025.

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David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.