Rambo, Die Hard, Indiana Jones.
There are also 3rd movies that are long time after the first two - Terminator, Crocodile Dundee, Godfather.
Desperate money-grab?
Beat me to it.
It’s called “Hollywood runs out of ideas.”
I don’t think it’s anything specific to third movies: The same thing happened to Rocky, too, after they’d already had how many?
Or to SUPERMAN and BATMAN, for that matter. To say nothing of movies about Tarzan, Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman (although there’s usually not as long as a 20 year span between re-makes/re-visits/re-thinks)
Rocky - 1976
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Rocky II - 1979
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Rocky III - 1982
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Rocky IV - 1985
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Rocky V - 1990
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Rocky Balboa - 2006
Then there’s George Romero’s Living Dead [del]trilogy[/del] [del]quadrilogy[/del] [del]quintilogy[/del] Saga. Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), then 20 yrs later Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and a 6th film, Survival of the Dead in the can waiting to be released. There’s also the 1990 remake of Night that we wrote and Tom Savini directed and the remakes of Dawn & Day that he had nothing to do with (the Day remake being utter garbage).
His former partner James Russo’s Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition which featured a new scenes and a subplot involving a priest, it’s sequel Children of the Livind Dead. Night has also been remade as Night of the Living Dead 3D, and apparently the Canadians are planing 3rd remake. Russo also created his own zombie franchise in the 1980s with Return of the Living Dead which has 4 sequels (in which the events of Night were said Romero’s fictional account of a “real” Army zombie experiment).
The reason why Night has been remade so many times (and many different versions of the original film released) is that in addition to being a classic film the copyright notice was accidently left of the new prints when the title was changed from Night of the Flesh Eaters and it lapsed into public domain. Anybody can remake it, make a sequel, rerelease it, make it into a play, etc without having to worry about paying royalties.
The thing with Romero’s movies, he can only make them when he gets funding to make them, he’d have made Land of the Dead in the 90’s if he could’ve just come up with the cash.
And Diary isn’t really a “sequel”, not that the others are really true direct sequels in a traditional sense anyway, but it’s intended as a “reboot”. You’ll note each of his previous movies each seem to be later and later in the “zombie timeline” as it were. Night is the outbreak, Dawn is shortly after the outbreak where people are still just trying to figure out what to do, Day is quite a bit after the outbreak where things are getting kinda desperate, and Land is long enough after the outbreak where there’s a whole mini-society going now despite the zombies just waiting to come chow down. Then Diary is back at the initial outbreak stage again.
(And yeah anything released called Day of the Dead other than the Romero original, whether it be the one falsely claiming to be a sequel, or the ‘reimagining’ with Ving Rhames, definitely utter garbage.)
The Terminator - 1984
T2 - 1991
T3 - 2003
Salvation - 2009
All of them are pretty far apart. Sure the gap between 2 and 3 is biggest, but none were really close enough that it seems as significant as Rambo Balboa or Die Hard’s Crystal Skull where you had a bunch fairly close, then a huge gap, then another.
I’ll add Star Wars to the list, there’s a twenty something year gap between the fourth film and the previous three.
I think there’s a difference in once again revisiting a story every few years by a different director making a different movie like with Dracula or Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes, and cases like the OP mentions where the new movie is meant ot be part of the same series of films, often with some of the same people involved.
The newest Superman movie probably counts though, since it was trying to be continuous with the Gene Hakcman/Cristopher Reeves films.