First Blood – Rambo
… I know they tried to fix that by calling it “Rambo (First Blood, Part 2)”, but I liked having that first movie separated from the blockbuster X-Treme Ac-tion! series. It was a smaller, lower-budget psychological study.
.
I got confused and went to see Willard - Scott …
.
(Took my centenarian grandma and she had a lovely time)
Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (Manon of the Spring).
Do operas count?
Wagner’s Nibelungenring cycle Das_Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung.
(And Wagner’s Parsifal is actually a prequel of sorts to his Lohengrin.)
And Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro is a sequel to Rossini’s Barber of Seville.
Back to more typical films: Unusually among Bollywood film franchises, the sequel to the 2003 hit Koi… Mil Gaya is called Krrish, which is why the following movie is called Krrish 3 although there are only two films explicitly titled Krrish.
Trouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place (not the movie).
On (and off) Broadway, there’s In Trousers and Falsettos (March of the Falsettos/Falsettoland).
Army of Darkness is the third movie in the Evil Dead series, following The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II and is succeeded by Evil Dead and Evil Dead Rise
Dirty Harry/Magnum Force/The Enforcer/Sudden Impact/The Dead Pool
Nitpick: Giovanni Paisiello’s Barber of Seville (1782). Rossini’s Barber of Seville - a different opera with different libretto drawn from the same play - premiered in 1816, 30 years after Figaro (1786). In modern parlance Rossini’s Barber would be a prequel to Mozart’s Figaro.
Huh, by golly you’re right, I just never noticed that!
The Maltese Falcon → The Black Bird. Though the latter was a comedy, it was a continuation of the original, down to a couple of actors reprising their roles.
Saturday Night Fever begat Staying Alive
Based on the novels the films were adapted from:
Die Hard(1988) is a sequel to The Detective(1968) starring Frank Sinatra.
The 1994 TV mini series Scarlett was, 55 years later, the sequel to Gone with the Wind.
I mean, naming the sequel after a song from the first one - a song that was probably more famous than the movie itself - is a bit of a hint. If I didn’t know the connection, I’d still suspect that Staying Alive had something to do with Saturday Night Fever.
Initially it was going to be “An Inkling of the Red October” and instead of a bookish CIA analyst the protagonist was going to be a bookish English professor…
The Hint for Red October: try looking underwater.
Perhaps not properly a sequel, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merry_Wives_of_Windsor# features John Falstaff, a character in Henry IV, Parts I and II. Tradition has it that Queen Elizabeth I asked Shakespeare to write a play depicting Falstaff in love.
If you were familiar with the original movie In the Heat of the Night you would know that the movie The Call me Mister Tibbs was a sequel, because it’s a significant quote by Sidney Poitier’s character. But I submit that you would never guess that The Organization was the second sequel.
From the original British titles you’d know that The Quatermass Xperiment, Quatermass 2, and Quatermass and the Pit were all in the same series. But the American titles almost seem designed to erase the connections: The Creeping Unknown, Enemy from Space, and the ludicrously-titled Five Million Years to Earth.
You also wouldn’t guess that Gigantis the Fire Monster was the sequel to Godzilla. Again, in Japan, the titles make it clear – they’re Gojira and Gojira’s Counterattack. (The latter was officially translated as Godzilla Raids Again. I regard the title as a joke by the US distributor that was lost on the representatives from Toho.)
From Russia with Love was mentioned but the whole James Bond series would fit the list.
One that came immediately to mind to me was "The Good the Bad and the Ugly" third in a trilogy with the second in the series “For a few dollars more” does reference “For a fistful of dollars”
I’m guessing it’s the same story for Dean Martin’s outings as Matt Helm, from THE SILENCERS to MURDERERS’ ROW, and from THE AMBUSHERS to THE WRECKING CREW, unless you want to argue that, no, see, they use those silencers at murderers’ row, because that’s where ambushers — a veritable wrecking crew of ‘em! — lurk…
And the same with Michael Caine as Harry Palmer: The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain. The 60s were big on spy series with unrelated names.
Angels & Demons
The Suicide Squad
The Two Jakes
US Marshals