Movie sequels seem to be more common and more popular than ever in the 21st century, often dominating at the box office. Yet, they just don’t get as much respect or awards recognition as literary sequels.
Far fewer sequels have won Academy Awards than have been recognized by science fiction and fantasy’s Hugo and Prometheus awards.
Just consider how few movie sequels have won the Oscar for Best Picture compared to how often sequel novels win a top SF/fantasy award.
Within the 46-year history of the Prometheus Awards, 194 of the 505 novels nominated within the Best Novel category have been sequels – and 11 have gone on to win.
Meanwhile, as recently reported here, nine sequel novels have won the Best Novel category in the 72-year history of the Hugo Awards, voted by members of the World Science Fiction Society and presented annually at the Worldcon.
Yet, in the 97 years that the Academy Awards have been presented, only two movie sequels have won Best Picture: The Godfather Part II and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
Intriguingly, both movies were key parts of the only trilogies or series to have three films nominated for Best Picture, perhaps partly reflecting the stature and impact of the overall effort.
And perhaps coincidentally, both movies dramatize libertarian and classical-liberal themes about the temptations and abuses of power.
THE GODFATHER SAGA
The first time a movie sequel won the Best Picture Oscar was The Godfather Part II in 1974, following the 1973 win for The Godfather. Both films were directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who completed his trilogy a generation later with The Godfather Part III, a 1990 Best Picture Oscar nominee.
The Godfather trilogy elevates the gangster film to Shakespearean and even Biblical levels in their multi-generational focus on families and troubled family legacies.
Intriguingly, from a libertarian perspective, both films illuminate perennial themes about abuse of power, the tragic consequences of violence and how it can divide and despoil families.
What happens when a family, or a community, takes the coercive power of government into their own hands? When does authority, in enforcing agreements or keeping the peace between factions, become corrupt and monstrous? These films raise enduring questions about authority, legitimacy, justice and the law that apply far beyond the stories of gangsters.
The Godfather series also is the only film series with multiple Best Picture winners.
THE LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY
The only other time a movie sequel won came in 2003, with the Best Picture win by The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
That followed multiple Oscar nominations, including consecutive Best Picture nominations, for the first two films directed by Peter Jackson in his epic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s bestselling trilogy.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings, nominated for 13 Oscars, won four in 2001. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, nominated for six Oscars, won two in 2002. All their awards were in technical categories.
When the massively popular and widely acclaimed culmination of the trilogy was released, it was unstoppable. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King swept all categories, winning all 11 awards.
It was the first time in the history of the Academy Awards that a fantasy film, or more broadly, any movie in the sf/fantasy genres received top honors – all well-deserved.
While some purists have quibbled with minor aspects of the film adaptations, especially the focus of the second film in elevating a minor battle to its centerpiece, the film trilogy generally is widely recognized for doing an impressive job in adapting an epic trilogy that many had thought unfilmable.
Like Tolkien’s trilogy novel, inducted in 2000 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, the three films illuminate a central and cautionary libertarian theme: Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely (an insight aptly embodied and symbolized by the one ring to rule them all and the terrible temptations it awakens even in the good.)
HOW TOLKIEN’S BESTSELLER LED TO THE FILMS’ SUCCESS
In my view, the rich source material and its increasing recognition in popular culture after initial mixed reviews, had a lot to do with the film’s success.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic high-fantasy trilogy novel, written between 1937 and 1949, began as a sequel to his 1937 children’s book The Hobbit. Originally intended by Tolkien to be one novel published in two parts, The Lord of the Rings ended up being published as three books in 1954 and 1955.
It may seem strange today, but the initial critical response to Tolkien’s master work was mixed to negative.
C.S. Lewis, poet W.H. Auden and novelist Iris Murdoch were among the few who gave it enthusiastic early reviews, with Auden regarding it as a masterpiece and comparing it favorably to Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Yet, many critics dismissed the work in the early years after its publication.
Perhaps the most savage, and most influential negative review, was titled “Oo, Those Awful Orcs!,” and written in 1956 by Edmund Wilson (The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair), widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s most important literary critics. Wilson’s review dismissed the high-fantasy work as “juvenile trash,” and claimed Tolkien had little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form.
An early reply to Wilson, in a 1957 review by the classicist Douglass Parker, defended The Lord of the Rings as a “world-building fantasy.” Parker went on to condemn and expose the “one serious attack” on the novel as a “rather nasty hatchet-job,” which “appears to have resulted from Wilson’s ineluctable conviction that all fantasy is trash, The Lord of the Rings is fantasy, ergo (the book was trash).”
Perhaps more clearly in retrospect, a major factor in the initial mixed to negative reviews was simply Tolkien’s chosen genre of fantasy.
Elite and mainstream critics, unfamiliar with fantasy, tended to look down on that genre as unserious, archaic, reactionary or not suitably fitting into their ideological assumptions. Typically, many of the same critics, leading magazines and newspapers also applied that myopic perspective to dismiss or outright ignore even the best works of many other genres, from romance and mystery to westerns and science fiction.
According to the literary scholar Brian Rosebury, the mixed reception also partly stemmed from Tolkien’s focus on creating a medieval-style heroic romance, which challenged mid-20th-century literary assumptions, especially the then-dominant ideologies of modernism and realism.
First published as a boxed set in 1957, Tolkien’s master work finally was published in 1968 as a single volume. Along with U.S. publication of the books in paperback in the 1960s, that broadened its accessibility and introduced it to a wider audience.
By the late 1960s, The Lord of the Rings had become a favorite of younger generations.
By the end of the 20th century, The Lord of the Rings has become one of the best-selling books ever written, with more than 150 million copies sold, according to the author’s estate.
By then, mainstream literature had broadened significantly to embrace the more fantastical genres, further lifting Tolkien’s trilogy to the status of a widely recognized classic of modern literature.
The Oscar-winning film trilogy, in many ways, cements that well-deserved reputation.
OTHER DESERVING FILM SEQUELS
Meanwhile, there have been some excellent film sequels that should have been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, but weren’t – most notably, The Empire Strikes Back, widely recognized in retrospect as the emotionally resonant best of the Star Wars films.
In my view, other film sequels that arguably should have been recognized more at the Oscars, especially with a Best Picture nomination, include Aliens (1986), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The Dark Knight (2008), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Logan (2017), Skyfall (2012), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Toy Story 2 (1999), and X2 (2003).
Of the 10 movie sequels I praise above, all but one fall clearly into the fantastical genres, either science fiction or horror or comic-book superheroes.
While I do admit my own bias towards such imaginative and speculative fare, I believe a main factor in such excellent and widely praised film sequels being overlooked at the Oscars is precisely because of their genre status – historically, not favored by film awards as much as more realistic or inspirational dramas.
At the same time, the Academy Awards have recognized 10 direct-sequel films as Best Picture nominees, and that includes several in the fantastical genres.
Besides The Godfather Part II and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which won Best Picture, and the other nominated films in the Godfather and LOTR trilogies, the other Best Picture nominees were The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945; the Bing Crosby sequel to the 1944 winner, Going My Way), Toy Story 3 (2010), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), Top Gun: Maverick (2022), and Dune: Part Two (2024).
Of those, the only sequels to be nominated without any predecessors being nominated are Toy Story 3, Mad Max: Fury Road and Top Gun: Maverick.
So in fact, the Oscars have recognized more genre sequels over the decades, but it’s revealing that most were nominated for Best Picture only within the past 15 years.
In a film era now dominated and often defined by mega-hits in the science fiction, fantasy and comic-book-hero genres, that may be partly a sign of the times and an Oscar nod to the success of the most acclaimed and bestselling films in such genres.
Yet, I also see it as a positive and hopeful sign of progress in overcoming previous anti-genre biases among the cultural elite and the mainstream.
In short, science fiction and fantasy are no longer in a literary ghetto.
For further reading: The 11 sequels that have won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel, along with other Prometheus winners that inspired sequels, are discussed in Part 1, Part 2 , Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 and Part 10 of this Prometheus Blog series exploring the popularity and appeal of sequels.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including in the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website. This page includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
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