I don’t know if this counts since these were all books before they were adapted for various TV and film versions, but…
Pretty much the whole of Agatha Christie’s Poirot series - with the exception of a couple that name Poirot in the title, and maybe a few that you might associate if you saw them adjacent to one another, like the ones that begin ‘Murder [on/in]…’
Same, or even more so with the Miss Marple series.
The Freshman and Mad Wednesday/The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. The latter started with scenes from the former and showed what Harold was doing years later.
I’m not sure book series should count here, even if movies were made from the books. Practically no one, except maybe Sue Grafton or John Updike, “serializes” their book titles.
I think they retroactively changed the title to Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, but it will always be The Road Warrior to me also.
Scenes from a Marriage and Saraband
In literature, you have The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years Aftßer, and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, all featuring d’Anangnan.
Lady in Cement (1968) is the sequel to Tony Rome (1967), Both starred Frank Sinatra as detective Tony Rome (and had Richard Conte in them).
Frank Sinatra also appeared as a detective, Joe Leland, in The Detective (1968) (Duh!). It was based on a 1966 novel of the same name by Roderick Thorpe. He later wrote a sequel, Nothing Lasts Forever (1979), also starring Leland. The novel was filmed in 1988 as Die Hard, famously starring Bruce Willis as the hero, renamed John McClane.
The one movie isn’t a direct sequel to the other, but they’re based on books in which one is sequel to the other. It’s similar to the relationship between Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986) and Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991).
Or between the many versions of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and the many versions of The Mysterious Island
Don’t forget Harry Kemelman, author of Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry, Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home…
Lindsay Davis’ Falco series, set in ancient Rome, started out with a pattern. They had metals (and sometimes gods) in the title – The Silver Pigs, Shadows in Bronze, Venus in Copper, Iron Hand of Mars, Poseidon’s Gold – but she stopped after the fifth book and never went back to it
I did!
Probably filed “Rabbi” and “Rabbit” in the same mental folder!
What adult man goes by the name Rabbit, anyway? “What’s up with that?”
What about something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Much of it is obvious, like Captain America: First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier are related.
However, other than gobs of marketing and ads, you’d have no way of knowing that Captain America: Civil War is a sequel to Avengers: Age of Ultron. Maybe it’s the “:” that ties them all together?
And Rabbit’s real name was…Harry. We’re through the looking glass here, people.
Demetrius an the Gladiators (1954) is the sequel to The Robe (1953), famous as being the first movie released in CinemaScope – that’ll show those TV shows, with their 1.37:1 ratio!
Harper, which introduced detective Lew Harper to film, was followed by The Drowning Pool.
Billy Jack (1971) was the sequel to The Born Losers (1967)
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) is the sequel to One Million Years B.C. (1966). Jim Danforth did a creditable job with the stop-motion animated dinosaurs, which were done in the first film by Ray Harryhausen). Certainly when you compare the work in these two films it stands up much better than between The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jack the Giant Killer, where Danforth was also following in Harryhausen’s footprints). Interesting thing – most of the stop-motion creatures weren’t actually dinosaurs. The Chasmosaurus and the Megalosaurus were, but not the others.
Actually, it was preceded by Prehistoric Women (1967), which used the same sets and costumes as One Million Years B.C., but it had no stop-motion creatures.
Creatures the World Forgot (1971) was the sequel, in turn, to When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. The title notwithstanding, there are no stop-motion creatures in this film. I guess they forgot.
“War of the Gargantuas” (1966) was the sequel to Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965), but in the finished product, the connection is pretty tenuous.
Trivia Note:
In one “Gomer Pyle” episode, Gomer is standing outside a movie theater, and the moving being played in “Frankenstein Conquers the World.” However, they have part of “Frankentstein” covered up, so all you see is “Ken Conquers the World.”
Good one. I saw Frankenstein Conquers the World in the theater when it was new (It was a cover story in Famous Monsters of Filmland, but I wasn’t aware for years that War of the Gargantuas was a sequel.
Bonus: WotG stars Russ Tamblyn, who was Rif, the leader of the Jets, in the first version of West Side Story. He was also in Dracula vs. Frankenstein. He later showed up in both incarnations of Twin Peaks
They really should have avoided confusion by calling them Batman Begins, Batman in the Middle, and Batman Ends.
John D. MacDonald did it with his Travis McGee books. All of the titles had a color in them.
And most of Ed McBain’s Matthew Hope books were titled after a nursery rhyme or fairy tale. The exception is the thirteenth (and last) one which was titled The Last Best Hope.