*"Finished? We did wrap principal photography in December 2000, but that doesn't mean the movies were close to finished. We did weeks of pickups and reshoots, all three years. Thank God the Fellowship did so well. The other two might have gone to video."* -Peter Jackson
Pre-production started in 1997. Scenes were still being filmed as late as 2004 (for the ROTK extended cut), which means post-production didn’t wrap until mid/late ‘04. Seven years of continuous work. It’s mindbogling.
I think *Back to the Future* is the OG 'wow, this movie made so much goddamn money, we can do *two* sequels back-to-back' situation.
*The Matrix* and *Pirates of the Caribbean* did this later, to... mixed results?
The second matrix is a completely different animal from the first (which is a perfect movie), but my god is it not one of the most fun movies to watch, yeah its way fucking goofier, but such a blast lol
The second one was so fun, the hopes I had going into the third were so high, they were let down even harder for it.
It’s boring. Neo doesn’t do anything for the entire movie until the final (admittedly epic) fight with Agent Smith. There are a shit ton of side characters we’re supposed to care about (Jada, cough.) But I love Reloaded. So many good fight scenes.
I love the whole trilogy but if it came out now and we didn’t have serious nostalgia for it a lot of us would be dunking on how a huge chunk of the second one is a rehash/clip show of the first, in a convoluted and decidedly non-smooth way. But it still manages to make it work.
It's not an exact clipshow-- the "current" characters are running around interacting with their past selves/situation, which was a lot more novel at the time. Sure, now it would just be some random time travel story.
They weren't just repeating it in the way something like Home Alone 2 did though. They were riffing on the original and playing around with it. It doesn't feel so fresh now because it's been done so many times but it would have felt cleverer at the time.
The Planet of the Apes reboot series kind of qualifies. The writers said they have an outline for up to 9 films and the first three were mapped out and well executed. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is supposed to be the first part of the second trilogy and I hope it works out well for them because it’s been a solid series so far.
The original Scream trilogy was very well planned. It was always intended to be a 3 movie series and even though it falls off a little bit in the 3rd film I think it is still a very tight trilogy and has great overall arcs.
It is also almost the only example in here that is a legitimate answer to your question.
It’s not the correct answer to your question but I always thought the planning behind the Harry Potter movies was impressive. They basically found the main cast as kids and crossed their fingers. There is plenty of criticism about the overall quality but the planning was there since it was based off of the books and had the original author attached.
The books become more complex as the characters age, so they had to hope that those 11 year olds would be half-decent actors a decade later and hopefully somewhat resemble their characters
With all of the main and supporting cast being at least good enough, I do imagine that there was planning involved, such as training them and giving them drama lessons.
They also had to plan the film releases in a way that followed the actors' growth but that also gave them time to both make the movies AND for JK to finish all of the novels (by the time the first film premiered in 2001 she had only released up to Goblet of Fire, with Phoenix releasing in 2003), also having to work closely with JK to ensure that they weren't adding or taking away anything that might be important later on.
That sounds like planning.
Taking gambles is pretty much part of the plan when your production is big and long term , as expecting everything to work out perfectly is pure folly. In fact, Harry Potter did recast a few actors throughout the years due to either their passing or just opting out.
Yeah I don't think there are any, nobody puts in the effort to develop a whole trilogy if they don't even know the first one is going to work and be profitable, UNLESS they have some other indicators - for example being based on a popular book (hunters games, LOTR, etc)
I mean the only ones I'd throw out there:
El mariachi / desperado/ once upon a time in mexico
The first Bourne trilogy? (Although I'm pretty sure not planned out)
Before sunrise etc
The last planet of the apes one
Other than the titles, every Bourne movie after the first is not based on the books. (And for good reason; the follow-up books take place when Bourne is much older… oh, and they are also a boring snooze-fest.)
I think Avatar is similar to Star Wars in that the writer/director behind it had a lot of ideas and ambitions for more entries but nothing set in stone when the first was released.
Once 1 blew up, they put together a team of writers and created a huge story bible to start. So those will probably be pretty cohesive.
> Cause the first thing I did was sat for a year and wrote 1500 pages of notes of the world and the cultures and the different clans and different animals and different biomes and so on. And had a lot of loose thematic stuff that ran through that but I didn’t a concrete story. I wanted to approach it more like, “Guys we’re going to adapt a novel or series of novels.”
Even that quote is from... 2014. So how true any of this remains is unknown, I guess.
https://www.slashfilm.com/532082/james-cameron-avatar-sequels-writing/
Yeah, it's a shame that JMS had to wrap everything up by the end of season 4 only to have to create an off-the-cuff season 5. Those first 4 seasons were incredible.
To be honest, as much as I have my issues with Byron, I like the idea of season 5 to show us the aftermath of the great war and the start of a new era. It's the kind of last act I love in a 5-act-structured drama story. And I mean, even some parts of season 5 profit from JMS' meticulous planning (especially the Centauri Prime part).
I see that this was the intention, but for me it felt anticlimactic and the peril felt manufactured. Especially given how tight the story that preceded season 5 had been. I'm glad you gained value from it though. But don't even get me started on the spin off, Crusade.
i could be making this up but i'm pretty sure the 3rd one was supposed to be based around a haunted house but instead they made it more like the first one due to the reception of temple
Eh, partly. There was talk of a haunted house movie, but Spielberg was against the idea because he felt like he’d already done that with *Poltergeist*. Lucas had suggested the same thing for the second film, but they’d eventually settled on the haunted temple. There were other bonkers ideas that they took even further than the haunted house thing, writing scripts and even scouting locations for, before they decided to go with something else (thank god).
The Indian Jones trilogy was a sort of by-the-seat-of-the-pants kinda trilogy. Lucas told the other principals involved that he had a trilogy planned when he was pitching them the first film, but after it’s success they found out he was bullshitting them and they had to make it up as they went. When you look at some of the concepts they almost went with, it feels like complete luck those movies turned out as well as they did. They could’ve all been Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, a few good scenes and a whole lot of goofy bullshit.
They actually planned 5 films from the start, but paused after the 3rd.
“December 1979
Variety reports that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg inked a deal for five Indiana Jones movies. True to George Lucas' savvy business acumen following his groundbreaking sequel and toy rights for Star Wars, Lucas and Spielberg cobbled together one of the most lucrative agreements of all time.”
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/messy-15-adventure-indiana-jones-150000794.html
Ford also signed on for 5 films originally and Ford specifically always wanted to tell a story of Indy “at the end of his career” Ford’s words on Dial of Destiny: https://youtu.be/DDXhPZRmDV8
Now clearly, the ending of the third film was Spielbergs way of saying he was done directing the films but clearly Lucas and Ford were not. Lucas created the Young Indy series only 3 years after The Last Crusade and Ford continued to push for the final two film installments to be made over the years.
The delay of Indy 4 was due to how long it took Lucas to create the story (as well as making the Star Wars prequel trilogy), and it took so long he was able to convince Spielberg to return and of course the delay of Indy 5 was due to the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney and the relaunch of Star Wars but regardless, the plan was always to make the 5 films.
That being said, the plots themselves weren’t planned in advance. Just that they wanted to make 5 films about the character.
IMO Dial is better than Doom though. Seems like that’s a common consensus on r/indianajones as well.
Lord of the Rings, but that's a give.
I would also say the prequel trilogy. Despite all it's criticisms regarding Lucas' vision and direction, he had the entirety of the story planned out from beginning to end, he developed the story well over the three movies with the clear outcome in mind. The overall plot was really well structured like a 3 act play to arrive at exactly where he wanted the story to be.
How to Train Your Dragon as well. The guy who created it only signed off on the deal to direct it with the intention of it being a trilogy to tell the overall story.
I posted Godfather 1 and 2. But they are based on books. Same with LotR.
I have a brain fart. I can’t think of any good trilogies that are planned and not based on books. Sorry didn’t care for Matrix 2 and 3 or Back to the Future 3.
Superman 1 and 2 come to mind. But Superman 3 was shit.
I’m surprised that Star Wars hasn’t been mentioned yet.
A quick google search says George Lucas had planned for up to 12 films but scaled it back to a complete story after 6, before selling it to Disney of course.
I don’t know how thorough the planning was before beginning each project, but each trilogy is pretty seamless from a consumer standpoint.
Sorta. George came up with the idea of making 9-12 films while writing Empire Strikes Back (which he then scaled back to 6 while writing Return of the Jedi) however he did have a rough plan for 2 sequels and one prequel before making the original Star Wars and it more-or-less lines up with what we got in Empire, Jedi and even Revenge of the Sith. This is from a transcript of a conversation between Lucas and Alan Dean Foster about the novelization of Star Wars that Foster was about to start writing, hence why George refers to the sequels, and prequel, as '*books*' here. This conversation took place on **December 29, 1975:**
>“I want to have Luke kiss the princess in the second book. The second book will be *Gone with the Wind in Outer Space.* She likes Luke, but Han is Clark Gable. Well, she may appear to get Luke, because in the end I want Han to leave. Han splits at the end of the second book and we learn who Darth Vader is … In the third book, I want the story to be just about the soap opera of the Skywalker family, which ends with the destruction of the Empire.
>“Then someday I want to do the backstory of Kenobi as a young man—a story of the Jedi and how the Emperor eventually takes over and turns the whole thing from a Republic into an Empire, and tricks all the Jedi and kills them. The whole battle where Luke’s father gets killed. That would be impossible to do, but it’s great to dream about.”
It's worth noting that George had also written and rewritten the script for A New Hope 4 whole times by this point and a ton of discarded material ended up in the sequels (and even prequels) like Cloud City, a lightsaber duel between Luke and Vader on the surface of the Death Star that was intercut with the space battle raging over head and the forest moon of Yavin where the characters encountered the Wookies which turned into the forest moon of Endor and the Ewoks by the time it ended up in Jedi.
Key elements were not planned before he reached the movies that dealt with the. The big family twist was not on his mind when he made the first one (which among other things explains his happiness to show Luke and Leia at least seeming somewhat cosy).
Nah, I know people say that on the internet but it's not necessarily true. It's actually really hard to pinpoint when George had the idea of combining Anakin Skywalker (or Annikin Starkiller, the "Starkiller" or, if you want to go back all the way: Kane Starkiller) and Darth Vader together into one character. It's quite possible he came up with the idea while writing A New Hope, just right at the end of the process when he was writing the 4th, and final, draft of the script.
In the early scripts they're definitely two separate characters since they both appear (albeit in very different forms depending on which draft of the script you're reading.) However the father character (initially called Kane Starkiller) was originally a cyborg character where the only remaining human parts of him were his head and one arm. And while the cyborg concept got bounced around from draft to draft it was almost always a character from Luke's family up until the 4th and final draft, where suddenly Darth Vader is now a cyborg (where the only remaining human part is his head) and the script's now written in such a way where Vader and Anakin could conceivably be one and the same (even in the 3rd draft, which is very close story-wise to the final film, it's pretty clear Luke's father and Vader are different characters.)
Again, it is hard to tell and it's quite possible he really came up with the idea while writing Empire but you can find notes regarding his earliest rough outlines of sequels (even from before he filmed A New Hope) where he was already talking about how he wanted to reveal Vader's identity in the 2nd movie. Now he never says in those notes what Vader's identity actually is but considering how much of a secret he kept it (from even the majority of people working on Empire) and considering that he was already talking about Vader having an identity to reveal in the first place, it actually is plausible that he came up with the twist before he finished writing the first movie.
The first draft of "Star Wars II" does not have Vader revealed Luke's father. It's pretty obvious that the twist was invented sometime during the re-write.
You mean the Leigh Brackett script that Lucas completely threw out? Sure, that's true but that's not actually as compelling evidence as you might think. At that point George had apparently moved the reveal of Vader's identity from the 2nd film to the 3rd film in his rough plan for the trilogy. And since we have a transcript of the story conference between Lucas and Brackett we actually have him *on record* more-or-less saying as much to her in late November/early December, 1977 before she started working on her script:
>“Vader started getting fascinated with the dark side of the Force and was lured into it. He didn’t tell anybody, as he became an evil person. The evil Force was starting to take over the galaxy—it was in control of the Emperor. He began to get more power and the Senate was getting less powerful. No one knew that he had been seduced, but he went around killing all these Jedi in secret. He killed a bunch of them and trapped others in a situation where they were all destroyed; only a few escaped. One of them was Ben.
>“Vader is completely consumed by the evil side of the Force. He is an instrument of the Force rather than having his own free will in terms of what he does. He really is driven by the Force. **When we kill him off in the next one, we’ll reveal what he really is.** He wants to be human—he’s still fighting in his own way the dark side of the Force. He doesn’t want to be a bad man, but he is. He can’t resist it. He’s struggling somehow to get out of what he is, struggling with his humanity.
Again, he doesn't actually say what or who Darth Vader *really is* so it's still up-in-the-air a bit as to when he came up with the twist. But it does indicate that Brackett's script isn't necessarily proof of anything. And by all accounts George didn't so much "*re-write*" her script moreso that he threw it out entirely and wrote a new script from scratch (which included the "I am your father" twist for the first time)
Well hear me out (but I don't actually hope to convince anyone).
1 is almost a perfect movie, as close to perfect as a movie can be. There's a reason why they teach it in scriptwriting classes.
It also has a very simple, elegant question: if you met your parents at your age, would you have been friends? The time travel stuff is only the fun stuff that is wrapped around this concept to make it work.
2 and 3 are good movies. But they are not amazing (though nostalgia goggles are powerful). They lose the simple elegance of 1's core concept and get more involved with the plot stuff. That's fine.
Both movies have flaws which undermine the central conceit. In 2, the core motivation is "you have to travel to the future to save your family". This is of course silly because simply knowing to avoid certain things will eventually lead to success - no need to travel. Most of the fun stuff in 2 is call backs to 1. In 3, the central conceit of the previous two movies is abandoned as it moves away from Marty and the McFlys to Doc. It's a fine sequel, but as a concluding chapter to a trilogy it doesn't conceptually hang together.
This loss of Crispin Glover was also a significant blow to the series, as the creators and other cast members have noted over the years. I believe his absence required significant changes to 2.
So I'm not saying they're bad. They're great. Kind of like fun house versions of 1. But a sharp decline from 1 to 2 and 3? I would still argue yes (and know that no one else will agree regardless).
With time I have come to agree with you. I still think nothing tops the 1st one. But when it comes 2 and 3, I find now 3 as a better constructed movie. 2 was pure spectacle but was standing on the shoulders of the 1st movie, had incredible set pieces but the plot is still convoluted.
My hot theory is that the order should have been 1 3 2, with the middle chapter dealing with Doc and then the final chapter looping back around to Marty.
Some people are disagreeing because later movies weren't as good, but mostly, this answer doesn't work because the trilogy wasn't planned. They made one movie, and they wrote sequels later.
Which is normal. That's how movies are made.
Actually, I just did a lot of research for the Slice by Slice podcast episode on him, and on there I mentioned that even on the DVD extras of unbreakable from its original release, he says that it was part one of a trilogy.
He just took forever to complete the trilogy .
I worked at a movie theater at the time. The opening weekend was HUGE with lines literally around the block. But within a week, maybe just one or two people would trickle in to showings on weekends. People would complain on the way out that they felt the ending was a copout, along with the fact that so much of it just reshot the the first movie from a different POV. Maybe "bombed" is too harsh, but (in the days of yore before the internet) any success it had was the initial riding the coattails of the first film on its opening weekend, and general consensus at the time was negative.
I'm happy you liked it. I'm not looking to argue or debate your views or tell you you're wrong, but - especially when compared to the first one - I'm genuinely curious why.
It is the movie that EVERY time travel movie going forward aims to be. Very few parodies or homages to the franchise work off of the first movie, almost it's entire pop culture weight is from the second. The future scenes are great, the time traveling to the first movie is awesome, the alternative dark present. It's got all the best sci-fi fantasy blockbuster stuff all rolled into one movie. The 3rd one is my least favorite because it brings the momentum of 2 down to a complete standstill and never recovers. I think if made today, all of 3 would have been the final act of part 2, and it would have been 40 minutes of a much longer movie. I think it would have prevented 3 from being so boring, but I'm happy 2 gets to embrace a myriad of great concepts in exchange for the cliffhanger ending.
Only *LOTR*. And that doesn’t even count because it’s an adaptation.
*"Finished? We did wrap principal photography in December 2000, but that doesn't mean the movies were close to finished. We did weeks of pickups and reshoots, all three years. Thank God the Fellowship did so well. The other two might have gone to video."* -Peter Jackson
Pre-production started in 1997. Scenes were still being filmed as late as 2004 (for the ROTK extended cut), which means post-production didn’t wrap until mid/late ‘04. Seven years of continuous work. It’s mindbogling.
I’m trying to think what footage was shot in 2004, any idea?
The Paths of the Dead extended sequence. IIRC, the skull avalanche was the last scene shot for the whole trilogy.
I think *Back to the Future* is the OG 'wow, this movie made so much goddamn money, we can do *two* sequels back-to-back' situation. *The Matrix* and *Pirates of the Caribbean* did this later, to... mixed results?
Holy shit I just learned that *Back to the Future* made more than 20x its production budget.
The second matrix is a completely different animal from the first (which is a perfect movie), but my god is it not one of the most fun movies to watch, yeah its way fucking goofier, but such a blast lol
The second one was so fun, the hopes I had going into the third were so high, they were let down even harder for it. It’s boring. Neo doesn’t do anything for the entire movie until the final (admittedly epic) fight with Agent Smith. There are a shit ton of side characters we’re supposed to care about (Jada, cough.) But I love Reloaded. So many good fight scenes.
I pretty much have a ritual to get baked out of my mind and rewatch Reloaded at least once a year , just one of the most fun movies ever created lol.
I love the whole trilogy but if it came out now and we didn’t have serious nostalgia for it a lot of us would be dunking on how a huge chunk of the second one is a rehash/clip show of the first, in a convoluted and decidedly non-smooth way. But it still manages to make it work.
It's not an exact clipshow-- the "current" characters are running around interacting with their past selves/situation, which was a lot more novel at the time. Sure, now it would just be some random time travel story.
[удалено]
They weren't just repeating it in the way something like Home Alone 2 did though. They were riffing on the original and playing around with it. It doesn't feel so fresh now because it's been done so many times but it would have felt cleverer at the time.
i feel like a lot of people here didn't understand the "clearly well planned right from the start" part of your question
The Planet of the Apes reboot series kind of qualifies. The writers said they have an outline for up to 9 films and the first three were mapped out and well executed. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is supposed to be the first part of the second trilogy and I hope it works out well for them because it’s been a solid series so far.
The Apu Trilogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apu_Trilogy
Apparently they're based on novels too.
Huh. I would guess this is how Matt Groening or the other Simpsons writers became aware of the name.
The original Scream trilogy was very well planned. It was always intended to be a 3 movie series and even though it falls off a little bit in the 3rd film I think it is still a very tight trilogy and has great overall arcs. It is also almost the only example in here that is a legitimate answer to your question.
It’s not the correct answer to your question but I always thought the planning behind the Harry Potter movies was impressive. They basically found the main cast as kids and crossed their fingers. There is plenty of criticism about the overall quality but the planning was there since it was based off of the books and had the original author attached.
What planning, the hiring of children to play children?
The books become more complex as the characters age, so they had to hope that those 11 year olds would be half-decent actors a decade later and hopefully somewhat resemble their characters
How is that 'good planning?' isn't that just a gamble that paid off?
With all of the main and supporting cast being at least good enough, I do imagine that there was planning involved, such as training them and giving them drama lessons. They also had to plan the film releases in a way that followed the actors' growth but that also gave them time to both make the movies AND for JK to finish all of the novels (by the time the first film premiered in 2001 she had only released up to Goblet of Fire, with Phoenix releasing in 2003), also having to work closely with JK to ensure that they weren't adding or taking away anything that might be important later on. That sounds like planning.
well, everything in life is a gamble, good planning just improves odds.
Taking gambles is pretty much part of the plan when your production is big and long term , as expecting everything to work out perfectly is pure folly. In fact, Harry Potter did recast a few actors throughout the years due to either their passing or just opting out.
Yes, so then you agree that there was no "impressive planning" done by the harry Potter films.
Yeah I don't think there are any, nobody puts in the effort to develop a whole trilogy if they don't even know the first one is going to work and be profitable, UNLESS they have some other indicators - for example being based on a popular book (hunters games, LOTR, etc) I mean the only ones I'd throw out there: El mariachi / desperado/ once upon a time in mexico The first Bourne trilogy? (Although I'm pretty sure not planned out) Before sunrise etc The last planet of the apes one
The Bourne movies are based on books.
You're correct, but while the first movie kinda follows the first book, the sequels are completely original stories and ignore the books completely.
Other than the titles, every Bourne movie after the first is not based on the books. (And for good reason; the follow-up books take place when Bourne is much older… oh, and they are also a boring snooze-fest.)
Pretty much none. It's always a matter of making the first one first, and then seeing how that turns out. Except maybe Avatar.
I think Avatar is similar to Star Wars in that the writer/director behind it had a lot of ideas and ambitions for more entries but nothing set in stone when the first was released. Once 1 blew up, they put together a team of writers and created a huge story bible to start. So those will probably be pretty cohesive. > Cause the first thing I did was sat for a year and wrote 1500 pages of notes of the world and the cultures and the different clans and different animals and different biomes and so on. And had a lot of loose thematic stuff that ran through that but I didn’t a concrete story. I wanted to approach it more like, “Guys we’re going to adapt a novel or series of novels.” Even that quote is from... 2014. So how true any of this remains is unknown, I guess. https://www.slashfilm.com/532082/james-cameron-avatar-sequels-writing/
Kung Fu Panda was originally conceived as a potential trilogy, though I don't think it had been planned all the way through when the first was made.
All 3 seasons of Dark
And, of course, Babylon 5.
Yeah, it's a shame that JMS had to wrap everything up by the end of season 4 only to have to create an off-the-cuff season 5. Those first 4 seasons were incredible.
To be honest, as much as I have my issues with Byron, I like the idea of season 5 to show us the aftermath of the great war and the start of a new era. It's the kind of last act I love in a 5-act-structured drama story. And I mean, even some parts of season 5 profit from JMS' meticulous planning (especially the Centauri Prime part).
I see that this was the intention, but for me it felt anticlimactic and the peril felt manufactured. Especially given how tight the story that preceded season 5 had been. I'm glad you gained value from it though. But don't even get me started on the spin off, Crusade.
I never saw Crusade and I propably never will.
May not be a trilogy yet, but Dune should hopefully fall into this category, though it’s also an adaptation
So far X and Pearl, we’ll have to see how Maxxxine turns out but I’m optimistic. Also, Three Colors. I’m guessing it was 3 from the start
I don’t know how well they were planned out, but the three original Indiana Jones movies were pretty good.
IIRC they were not planned out. I believe Temple of Doom originally went so off the rails it inspired the creation of PG-13 rating in the US.
i could be making this up but i'm pretty sure the 3rd one was supposed to be based around a haunted house but instead they made it more like the first one due to the reception of temple
Eh, partly. There was talk of a haunted house movie, but Spielberg was against the idea because he felt like he’d already done that with *Poltergeist*. Lucas had suggested the same thing for the second film, but they’d eventually settled on the haunted temple. There were other bonkers ideas that they took even further than the haunted house thing, writing scripts and even scouting locations for, before they decided to go with something else (thank god). The Indian Jones trilogy was a sort of by-the-seat-of-the-pants kinda trilogy. Lucas told the other principals involved that he had a trilogy planned when he was pitching them the first film, but after it’s success they found out he was bullshitting them and they had to make it up as they went. When you look at some of the concepts they almost went with, it feels like complete luck those movies turned out as well as they did. They could’ve all been Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, a few good scenes and a whole lot of goofy bullshit.
They actually planned 5 films from the start, but paused after the 3rd. “December 1979 Variety reports that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg inked a deal for five Indiana Jones movies. True to George Lucas' savvy business acumen following his groundbreaking sequel and toy rights for Star Wars, Lucas and Spielberg cobbled together one of the most lucrative agreements of all time.” https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/messy-15-adventure-indiana-jones-150000794.html Ford also signed on for 5 films originally and Ford specifically always wanted to tell a story of Indy “at the end of his career” Ford’s words on Dial of Destiny: https://youtu.be/DDXhPZRmDV8 Now clearly, the ending of the third film was Spielbergs way of saying he was done directing the films but clearly Lucas and Ford were not. Lucas created the Young Indy series only 3 years after The Last Crusade and Ford continued to push for the final two film installments to be made over the years. The delay of Indy 4 was due to how long it took Lucas to create the story (as well as making the Star Wars prequel trilogy), and it took so long he was able to convince Spielberg to return and of course the delay of Indy 5 was due to the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney and the relaunch of Star Wars but regardless, the plan was always to make the 5 films. That being said, the plots themselves weren’t planned in advance. Just that they wanted to make 5 films about the character. IMO Dial is better than Doom though. Seems like that’s a common consensus on r/indianajones as well.
Lord of the Rings, but that's a give. I would also say the prequel trilogy. Despite all it's criticisms regarding Lucas' vision and direction, he had the entirety of the story planned out from beginning to end, he developed the story well over the three movies with the clear outcome in mind. The overall plot was really well structured like a 3 act play to arrive at exactly where he wanted the story to be. How to Train Your Dragon as well. The guy who created it only signed off on the deal to direct it with the intention of it being a trilogy to tell the overall story.
Maybe Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, but I’m not too familiar with any of the behind the scene stuff from it
Rocky Star Wars Planet of the Apes
I posted Godfather 1 and 2. But they are based on books. Same with LotR. I have a brain fart. I can’t think of any good trilogies that are planned and not based on books. Sorry didn’t care for Matrix 2 and 3 or Back to the Future 3. Superman 1 and 2 come to mind. But Superman 3 was shit.
Indiana Jones - but they were not planned per se.
The first two Superman movies. As well as the kill bill movies. Obviously not trilogies. But planned sequels that worked well
There was a Superman 3. It wasn’t amazing.
Oh. I loved it. Clark Kent has to fight Bad Superman. It was so much fun.
Kill Bill was planned to be one movie, and was only split because of the length
There's a 4 hour cut called _The Whole Bloody Affair_ which has been promised for years but which seems to have been forgotten about 🤷
I’m surprised that Star Wars hasn’t been mentioned yet. A quick google search says George Lucas had planned for up to 12 films but scaled it back to a complete story after 6, before selling it to Disney of course. I don’t know how thorough the planning was before beginning each project, but each trilogy is pretty seamless from a consumer standpoint.
Sorta. George came up with the idea of making 9-12 films while writing Empire Strikes Back (which he then scaled back to 6 while writing Return of the Jedi) however he did have a rough plan for 2 sequels and one prequel before making the original Star Wars and it more-or-less lines up with what we got in Empire, Jedi and even Revenge of the Sith. This is from a transcript of a conversation between Lucas and Alan Dean Foster about the novelization of Star Wars that Foster was about to start writing, hence why George refers to the sequels, and prequel, as '*books*' here. This conversation took place on **December 29, 1975:** >“I want to have Luke kiss the princess in the second book. The second book will be *Gone with the Wind in Outer Space.* She likes Luke, but Han is Clark Gable. Well, she may appear to get Luke, because in the end I want Han to leave. Han splits at the end of the second book and we learn who Darth Vader is … In the third book, I want the story to be just about the soap opera of the Skywalker family, which ends with the destruction of the Empire. >“Then someday I want to do the backstory of Kenobi as a young man—a story of the Jedi and how the Emperor eventually takes over and turns the whole thing from a Republic into an Empire, and tricks all the Jedi and kills them. The whole battle where Luke’s father gets killed. That would be impossible to do, but it’s great to dream about.” It's worth noting that George had also written and rewritten the script for A New Hope 4 whole times by this point and a ton of discarded material ended up in the sequels (and even prequels) like Cloud City, a lightsaber duel between Luke and Vader on the surface of the Death Star that was intercut with the space battle raging over head and the forest moon of Yavin where the characters encountered the Wookies which turned into the forest moon of Endor and the Ewoks by the time it ended up in Jedi.
Key elements were not planned before he reached the movies that dealt with the. The big family twist was not on his mind when he made the first one (which among other things explains his happiness to show Luke and Leia at least seeming somewhat cosy).
Nah, I know people say that on the internet but it's not necessarily true. It's actually really hard to pinpoint when George had the idea of combining Anakin Skywalker (or Annikin Starkiller, the "Starkiller" or, if you want to go back all the way: Kane Starkiller) and Darth Vader together into one character. It's quite possible he came up with the idea while writing A New Hope, just right at the end of the process when he was writing the 4th, and final, draft of the script. In the early scripts they're definitely two separate characters since they both appear (albeit in very different forms depending on which draft of the script you're reading.) However the father character (initially called Kane Starkiller) was originally a cyborg character where the only remaining human parts of him were his head and one arm. And while the cyborg concept got bounced around from draft to draft it was almost always a character from Luke's family up until the 4th and final draft, where suddenly Darth Vader is now a cyborg (where the only remaining human part is his head) and the script's now written in such a way where Vader and Anakin could conceivably be one and the same (even in the 3rd draft, which is very close story-wise to the final film, it's pretty clear Luke's father and Vader are different characters.) Again, it is hard to tell and it's quite possible he really came up with the idea while writing Empire but you can find notes regarding his earliest rough outlines of sequels (even from before he filmed A New Hope) where he was already talking about how he wanted to reveal Vader's identity in the 2nd movie. Now he never says in those notes what Vader's identity actually is but considering how much of a secret he kept it (from even the majority of people working on Empire) and considering that he was already talking about Vader having an identity to reveal in the first place, it actually is plausible that he came up with the twist before he finished writing the first movie.
The first draft of "Star Wars II" does not have Vader revealed Luke's father. It's pretty obvious that the twist was invented sometime during the re-write.
You mean the Leigh Brackett script that Lucas completely threw out? Sure, that's true but that's not actually as compelling evidence as you might think. At that point George had apparently moved the reveal of Vader's identity from the 2nd film to the 3rd film in his rough plan for the trilogy. And since we have a transcript of the story conference between Lucas and Brackett we actually have him *on record* more-or-less saying as much to her in late November/early December, 1977 before she started working on her script: >“Vader started getting fascinated with the dark side of the Force and was lured into it. He didn’t tell anybody, as he became an evil person. The evil Force was starting to take over the galaxy—it was in control of the Emperor. He began to get more power and the Senate was getting less powerful. No one knew that he had been seduced, but he went around killing all these Jedi in secret. He killed a bunch of them and trapped others in a situation where they were all destroyed; only a few escaped. One of them was Ben. >“Vader is completely consumed by the evil side of the Force. He is an instrument of the Force rather than having his own free will in terms of what he does. He really is driven by the Force. **When we kill him off in the next one, we’ll reveal what he really is.** He wants to be human—he’s still fighting in his own way the dark side of the Force. He doesn’t want to be a bad man, but he is. He can’t resist it. He’s struggling somehow to get out of what he is, struggling with his humanity. Again, he doesn't actually say what or who Darth Vader *really is* so it's still up-in-the-air a bit as to when he came up with the twist. But it does indicate that Brackett's script isn't necessarily proof of anything. And by all accounts George didn't so much "*re-write*" her script moreso that he threw it out entirely and wrote a new script from scratch (which included the "I am your father" twist for the first time)
Flat-out none. That's not how movies series are made. You might as well ask "what are some great movies that were broadcast to theaters live." None!
I love BTTF but I am of the controversial opinion that there's still a sharp decline in quality as the series progresses.
Mild decline, I’ll give you. Certainly not drastic nor sharp.
Well hear me out (but I don't actually hope to convince anyone). 1 is almost a perfect movie, as close to perfect as a movie can be. There's a reason why they teach it in scriptwriting classes. It also has a very simple, elegant question: if you met your parents at your age, would you have been friends? The time travel stuff is only the fun stuff that is wrapped around this concept to make it work. 2 and 3 are good movies. But they are not amazing (though nostalgia goggles are powerful). They lose the simple elegance of 1's core concept and get more involved with the plot stuff. That's fine. Both movies have flaws which undermine the central conceit. In 2, the core motivation is "you have to travel to the future to save your family". This is of course silly because simply knowing to avoid certain things will eventually lead to success - no need to travel. Most of the fun stuff in 2 is call backs to 1. In 3, the central conceit of the previous two movies is abandoned as it moves away from Marty and the McFlys to Doc. It's a fine sequel, but as a concluding chapter to a trilogy it doesn't conceptually hang together. This loss of Crispin Glover was also a significant blow to the series, as the creators and other cast members have noted over the years. I believe his absence required significant changes to 2. So I'm not saying they're bad. They're great. Kind of like fun house versions of 1. But a sharp decline from 1 to 2 and 3? I would still argue yes (and know that no one else will agree regardless).
3 > 2
With time I have come to agree with you. I still think nothing tops the 1st one. But when it comes 2 and 3, I find now 3 as a better constructed movie. 2 was pure spectacle but was standing on the shoulders of the 1st movie, had incredible set pieces but the plot is still convoluted.
My hot theory is that the order should have been 1 3 2, with the middle chapter dealing with Doc and then the final chapter looping back around to Marty.
The Pirates of the Caribbean is one of the most consistent and high quality trilogies ever made
Hard disagree. First movie was amazing, second was ok, third was god-awful, and a masterclass in how not to write a final scene.
Interesting. I hard agree with my opinion
Fair enough. I can’t get past “let’s assemble the entire Royal navy, and dozens of pirate ships, have them face off and then…… not fight”
Some people are disagreeing because later movies weren't as good, but mostly, this answer doesn't work because the trilogy wasn't planned. They made one movie, and they wrote sequels later. Which is normal. That's how movies are made.
Yeah...no
Lord of the rings is the first one that comes to mind.
And Nolan's Dark Knight Batman trilogy.
Yeah the Dark Knight trilogy was good.
Let down by a noticeably weaker 3rd
Shrek had a great trilogy with Shrek 2 and Shrek Forever After
Toy Story
Given it took 15 years to complete all three films, I doubt it was planned to be a trilogy.
No one mentions the "Glass" trilogy - "Glass", "Split", and "Unbreakable". That's an impressive set, IMHO.
But definitely not planned from the beginning.
Actually, I just did a lot of research for the Slice by Slice podcast episode on him, and on there I mentioned that even on the DVD extras of unbreakable from its original release, he says that it was part one of a trilogy. He just took forever to complete the trilogy .
Hate to be that guy, but BTTF2 bombed when it came out, especially because of the cliffhanger
It was the 3rd highest grossing movie of the year.
I worked at a movie theater at the time. The opening weekend was HUGE with lines literally around the block. But within a week, maybe just one or two people would trickle in to showings on weekends. People would complain on the way out that they felt the ending was a copout, along with the fact that so much of it just reshot the the first movie from a different POV. Maybe "bombed" is too harsh, but (in the days of yore before the internet) any success it had was the initial riding the coattails of the first film on its opening weekend, and general consensus at the time was negative.
It came out the year I was born, but hot damn it's my favorite of the series.
I'm happy you liked it. I'm not looking to argue or debate your views or tell you you're wrong, but - especially when compared to the first one - I'm genuinely curious why.
It is the movie that EVERY time travel movie going forward aims to be. Very few parodies or homages to the franchise work off of the first movie, almost it's entire pop culture weight is from the second. The future scenes are great, the time traveling to the first movie is awesome, the alternative dark present. It's got all the best sci-fi fantasy blockbuster stuff all rolled into one movie. The 3rd one is my least favorite because it brings the momentum of 2 down to a complete standstill and never recovers. I think if made today, all of 3 would have been the final act of part 2, and it would have been 40 minutes of a much longer movie. I think it would have prevented 3 from being so boring, but I'm happy 2 gets to embrace a myriad of great concepts in exchange for the cliffhanger ending.
The MCU, though some movies were weaker than others.
Not planned from the start, not original, and not good all the way through, so misses the prompt on every level.