12 Times A Franchise Released More Than One Movie Sequel In The Same Year

In our current era of reboots and legacy sequels, it's not unusual for a film sequel to arrive years, if not decades, after the original. Director George Miller spent thirty years among the pigs and penguins before returning to the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max with 2015's sequel/reboot "Mad Max: Fury Road," while David Gordon Green ignored four decades of horror sequels and declared his 2018 "Halloween" a follow-up to the 1978 original only. But before studios could reliably count on multigenerational intellectual properties — kept relevant through a seemingly inexhaustible amount of audience goodwill — it was generally understood that sequels should strike while the iron was hot. If a film was a success, a sequel needed to happen as soon as possible, and sometimes a sequel could even make it to theaters or home video within a year of the original film's release.

Sometimes a sequel arriving hot on the heels of its original marks it as a blatant cash grab, but there are other circumstances. Occasionally multiple parts of a successful franchise are filmed simultaneously in order to be released within months of each other. Other times the sequels are filmed over several years, but for one reason or another are released together. In extremely rare occasions, the "sequel" is in fact a competing production from a rival studio. Here are twelve examples of times when a film franchise released more than one sequel in the same calendar year.

The circumstances that led to both Roger Moore and Sean Connery playing James Bond in 1983 are complicated and go back several decades. In the '50s, Bond author Ian Fleming collaborated with writer Kevin McClory on an unused 007 film script that eventually became the novel "Thunderball." In 1961 McClory sued Fleming and eventually was awarded a story credit on the novel's 1965 film adaptation, as well as ownership of certain story elements — most notably the terrorist organization SPECTRE and its cat-loving leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld (per Variety).

McClory spent more than a decade in various legal battles with United Artists in order to make his own film, and in 1983 he finally got his chance. "Never Say Never Again" — produced for Warner Bros. — is essentially a remake of "Thunderball," with SPECTRE once again holding the world hostage with a pair of nuclear warheads. Its ace in the hole, of course, is Connery, returning to the role he made famous for the first time since 1971's "Diamonds Are Forever," but the film also boasts solid action scenes from director Irvin Kershner and a great performance from Barbara Carrera as scenery-chewing femme fatale Fatima Blush. Meanwhile, the official Bond franchise kept chugging along in the same year with the very silly "Octopussy," which has 007 (Roger Moore in his sixth appearance) foiling a rogue Soviet general and an exiled Afghan prince with the help of a cadre of beautiful circus-trained jewel thieves.

Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 sci-fi novel "The Lost World" posits a land, deep within the jungles of South America, that is untouched by the forces of evolution, where dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures still tread. 80 years later, a Canadian-Italian co-production (financed by future disgraced Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) brought Doyle's fantasy realm to life — albeit in Africa instead of South America. John Rhys-Davies stars as intrepid explorer George Challenger, whose claims of dinosaurs roaming free in the 20th century have made him a laughing stock in the British scientific community. Undeterred, he launches an expedition bankrolled by a plucky heiress (Tamara Gorski), dragging along a Canadian journalist (Eric McCormack) and a rival scientist (David Warner).

The film is nearly half over before we spot our first dinosaur, and for good reason. While Edwardian England has been handsomely recreated by the production, the creature effects are laughably rubberized. A follow-up feature, "Return to the Lost World," was filmed simultaneously. Picking up the story some years later, Challenger and his ragtag crew return to the lost world to foil a Belgian industrialist bent on exploiting the land for its natural resources. Filmed with mostly the same cast, crew, and locations — and covering much of the same narrative ground — the sequel is barely distinguishable from the first film and it even uses the same opening sequence, including Gorski's "Introducing" credit.

Arguably no other single film did more to define sci-fi in the 21st century than the Wachowskis' 1999 hit "The Matrix." The dystopian-wuxia-superhero-western mashup coined a whole new cinematic language, and its impact can still be seen in aesthetics, special effects technology, and — perhaps unfortunately — in real life today. A sequel was all but guaranteed, but the task of living up to fans' massive expectations was daunting. Four years after Neo (Keanu Reeves) flew through the air at the end of the first film, the Wachowskis returned with not one sequel but two: "The Matrix Reloaded" in May 2003 and six months later, "The Matrix Revolutions."

The films promised everything a sequel should have — bigger and better action setpieces, more of the characters we loved from the first film — along with a few things specific to this franchise, like answers to the many questions posed by its increasingly convoluted mythology. But while the sequels could deliver the goods when it came to action — the highway motorcycle chase in "Reloaded" remains an all-timer 20 years later — it fared less well when trying to untangle its own dorm-room philosophical inquiries into the nature of reality and free will. "Revolutions" was largely seen as a disappointing capper to the trilogy, and when Lana Wachowski returned 18 years later to helm the reboot "The Matrix Resurrections," it seemed as much to craft a proper ending as it was to start a new beginning.

The tongue-in-decaying-cheek "Return of the Living Dead" series ran for three bloody, campy entries from 1985 to 1993. But just like a corpse exposed to the military-grade poison gas Tryoxin (or Trioxin, depending on the film), the series rose from the grave more than a decade later — perhaps spurred on by the success of Zack Snyder's 2004 "Dawn of the Dead" remake. In 2005, two brand new "Return of the Living Dead" sequels were inflicted upon the world, putting a new generation of teens in the path of shambling corpses hungry for "Braaaaaains!"

"Necropolis" — the first of the new sequels — stars Aimee-Lynn Chadwick and Cory Hardrict as a couple of high school students whose friend (Elvin Dandel) is kidnapped by a nefarious corporation doing research on reanimated bodies. Peter Coyote guest stars as the doctor in charge of the experiments, and he appears again in the follow-up, "Rave to the Grave." Taking place a year after the zombie outbreak that ended "Necropolis," the sequel follows the surviving high schoolers — now in college — as a stray canister of Trioxin gets synthesized into a party drug and starts turning ravers into zombies. Beyond using Trioxin as the source of the zombie scourge, the films — which wound up going straight to the Syfy Channel — bear little resemblance to the first three, lacking their punk rock sensibility and love for gooey, goopy monsters.

Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson's posthumously released "Millennium" trilogy became a global sensation when the first novel, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" was published in English in 2008. A feature film adaptation from Swedish production company Yellow Bird followed in early 2009, along with adaptations of the other two novels in the series, "The Girl Who Played with Fire" and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest" later in the year. The complete trilogy was given a limited theatrical run in the United States in 2010 by the distribution arm of Chicago's Music Box Theater.

Starring Noomi Rapace as hacker Lisbeth Salander and Michael Nyqvist as intrepid journalist Mikael Blomkvist, the films are a pitch-black journey into the sins of Sweden's past — and for international audiences, possibly their first taste of the uniquely dark, sexy, and disturbing genre of Scandinavian crime fiction. Directors Niels Arden Oplev and Daniel Alfredson (who helmed the last two films) don't shy away from the sexual violence that is endemic to Larsson's work — the original Swedish title of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" translates to "Men Who Hate Women," after all. And while the sequels may not have the same visceral thrill as the first film, all three come together to paint a bleak portrait of a culture that has yet to reckon with the rottenness at its core.

Writer-director Ti West's breakthrough film was the 2009 '80s horror pastiche "The House of the Devil." Though he has done a lot of work in the years since — both as an auteur and as a hired gun — his sensibilities have never strayed too far from the proverbial video store. In the 2022 horror film "X," West takes aim at the skin and grime of '70s exploitation films, particularly Tobe Hooper's seminal "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Set in 1979, "X" sees an independent film crew renting a rural Texas farmhouse to shoot a porno, but their presence awakens bloodthirsty urges in the house's elderly owners. West assembled a truly oddball cast, including Brittany Snow, rapper Kid Cudi, and Jenna Ortega as the film crew, along with Mia Goth in a dual role as would-be starlet Maxine, and Pearl — the murderous old woman who becomes fixated on her.

Shooting in New Zealand in 2021, West and his crew were subject to a two-week quarantine for covid-19, and in that fortnight he and Goth wrote an entire prequel script and sold it to studio A24 (via LA Times). "Pearl" — the demented origin story of the villain in "X" — was shot back-to-back with the first film on many of the same sets, and with crew on loan from "Avatar: The Way of Water." Goth once again plays Pearl, this time as a young woman in 1918, desperate to become a Hollywood star but suffocating under the roof of her strict German immigrant parents. West trades in the lo-fi 16mm look of "X" for something closer to a mid-century Technicolor musical, but his greatest effect is Goth's sympathetic and unsettling performance.