Best film sequels of all time

Mark Hamill in "Star Wars Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back," 1980

'The Empire Strikes Back' is arguably even better than its smash-hit predecessor

(Image credit: LUCASFILM / Alamy)

published 25 July 2025

Film sequels have to walk a delicate line between telling the same story twice and alienating fans by departing too far from the original's ethos and narrative. And because not all — or even many — stories need to be fleshed out further, history is littered with mediocre sequels, some, like "The Matrix Revolutions," so bad they make you wonder whether their predecessors were any good in the first place. But every now and again, a sequel comes along that is every bit as good as what it builds on.

'The Empire Strikes Back' (1980)

The sequel to "Star Wars," which was at the time the biggest box office smash in film history, was not met with universal hosannas. The film is a "big, expensive, time-consuming, essentially mechanical operation," said The New York Times when it was released. But the movie is now widely regarded as the best entry in the increasingly sprawling franchise. It traces the fallout after rebels destroyed the evil intergalactic empire's flagship Death Star at the end of the original, hunting the Rebel Alliance including Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) to the icy planet Hoth. "The Empire Strikes Back" is a "visual extravaganza from beginning to end, one of the most visionary and inventive of all films," said Roger Ebert.

Director Ridley Scott's 1979 space-horror classic "Alien" was a genre-defining hit that spawned a franchise now in its fifth decade, including a highly anticipated FX television series. James Cameron's 1986 sequel is considered by many to be the equal of, or even superior to, the original. "Aliens" picks up 57 years after the events of the first film, when a salvage ship finds a hibernating Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the sole survivor of her vessel after it was slaughtered by the now-iconic extra-terrestrial xenomorphs. While it "filled me with feelings of unease and disquiet and anxiety," the sequel is an "intense and horrifying thriller" that is a "superb example of filmmaking craft," said Roger Ebert.

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In James Cameron's "The Terminator," Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg killer was one of the most memorable — and chilling — villains of 1980s cinema. In the original, he gets sent back in time by humanity's post-apocalyptic AI overlords to eliminate the future human resistance leader, John Connor, before he's born by killing Connor's mother, Sarah (Linda Hamilton). That made the plot maneuver in the sequel especially clever. Instead of being sent back in time to kill Connor (Edward Furlong), Schwarzenegger instead plays a cyborg sent to protect him. The result was a "swift, exciting special-effects epic that thoroughly justifies its vast expense and greatly improves upon the first film's potent but rudimentary visual style," said The New York Times.

The second film in director Christopher Nolan's reboot of the Batman franchise featured Heath Ledger, who died of a drug overdose before the film was released, as the Joker, a "disturbed, articulate terrorist who's hell-bent on creating chaos," said Paste Magazine. The Joker promises to kill Batman (Christian Bale) to liberate Gotham City's underworld figures from Batman's omniscient crime fighting. He then engages in an escalating series of terrorist attacks to lure Batman out and reveal his true identity. Led by Ledger's "unnervingly thorough performance," the film succeeds by creating "operatic conflict between tortured good and contented chaos," said The AV Club.

Comedy sequels, from "The Hangover Part II" to "Caddyshack II," have a pretty dim reputation, which makes the occasional exception all the more notable. Sacha Baron Cohen's early-aughts character Borat Sagdiyev is revived here in another mockumentary-style adventure in which Borat, fresh off serving 14 years in prison in his native Kazakhstan, is dispatched to the United States where, among many other adventures, he attempts to give his daughter (Maria Bakalova) away as a prize to then-Vice President Mike Pence. The film may always be remembered for ensnaring the hapless Rudy Giuliani, but by featuring "surprisingly satisfying, if simple, story and character arcs," it makes Cohen one of the few to "nail the Legacy Sequel format," said Den of Geek.

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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.