I have always loved the idea of a movie trilogy (probably because I was such a Star Wars kid), they always seemed like complete works of art. This is part of the reason why I am so fine with the Hobbit becoming a trilogy. I decided to compile this list of some great movie trilogies that might not jump to your mind when talking about trilogies. So I didn’t include stuff like the Godfather, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, or Back to the Future etc, because those are pretty obvious. The first three are unofficial trilogies, they have the same director and thematic material, but they don’t share characters (If only At World’s End was out, I would definitely have added The Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy). One thing that most trilogies share is that the third entry is usually the weakest (Godfather, Spider Man, X-men etc). I have been thinking about this phenomenon for a while. It could be that filmmakers get lazy when they get to the third entry, they ran out of story to tell, or any other number of things. While movies fail for myriad reasons, if there is actually a statistical difference with the reception of the third entries, I believe I’ve figured out a big reason for this. Imagine a theoretically successful movie that has the potential to be a franchise. The sequel is made. This sequel can either be successful or not. If it is not successful, then it is less likely that a third film will be made. Therefore, when you think about trilogies that have weak third films, that isn’t that surprising when you factor in the potential trilogies that had weak second films and thus weren’t able to complete the trilogy (think Conan, Ghostbusters etc). Regardless, on to the trilogies.
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