Comedy is notoriously tricky to pull off, so it’s rare that a comedy movie sequel can recapture what made the original so great, and even rarer that a threequel can conclude the trilogy in a satisfying way. Most comedy movie trilogies go off the rails long before then.Meet the ParentsandThe Hangoverare a pair of comedy masterpieces, but the third entries in their respective franchises are borderline unwatchable. From theBack to the Futuretrilogy to theThree Flavors Cornettotrilogy, very few comedy movie trilogies have managed to stick the landing.
Clerks (1994-2022)
Kevin Smith gave every aspiring indie filmmaker a blueprint for success with his idiosyncratic low-budget comedyClerks. Shot on a shoestring budget at the convenience store where he worked, Smith’s debut feature offered a day in the lives of two best friends over the course of a typically mundane shift at their dead-end jobs. In the decades that followed,Smith’s filmmaking became hit-and-miss, producing both standout gems likeChasing Amyand unwatchable duds likeCop Out. But he always brought his A-game to theClerkssequels.
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Clerks IItransplanted the original movie’s day-in-the-life formula to a fast food restaurant, whileClerks III– released just a couple of months ago– brought the whole saga full circle with an indie filmmaking storyline. The tearjerking threequel took some big emotional swings, but Smith’s dedication to these characters made it work.
The Naked Gun (1988-1994)
In the streaming era, a show as smart and subversive and densely packed with jokes asPolice Squad!would run for years and years. But back in 1982, it only ran for six episodes before being canceled because the audience had to pay attention. Luckily, Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker’s police procedural parody found a second life on the big screen withThe Naked Gunseries. Leslie Nielsen reprised his role asbumbling detective Frank Drebinin the trilogy of hard-boiled noir spoofs.
Neither of the two sequels –The Naked Gun 2 1⁄2: The Smell of FearandNaked Gun 33 1⁄3: The Final Insult– are quite as masterfully crafted or timelessly hysterical as the groundbreaking original, but all three movies have plenty of laughs, and each one is carried by Nielsen’s uniquely deadpan performance as Drebin.
Austin Powers (1997-2002)
Mike Myers satirized both the culture of the Swinging Sixties andthe tropes of the James Bond franchisewith his 1997 gemAustin Powers: International Man of Mystery. In true Peter Sellers style, Myers played both his spoof of 007 and his spoof of Blofeld (and a bunch of other characters on top of that). Austin is a spot-on parody of the hypercompetence, hypersexuality, and corny one-liners of Bond himself, while Dr. Evil is a spot-on parody ofthe megalomania of the average Bond villain.
The sequels both shook up the formula –The Spy Who Shagged Mesent Austin back to the ‘60s, thenGoldmemberintroduced his estranged father, played brilliantly by Michael Caine – without losing the first film’s groovy style and rapid-fire gag rate.
Back To The Future (1985-1990)
Robert Zemeckis’Back to the Futureis a true masterpiece that no sequel would be able to top. Its perfectly crafted script uses plant-and-payoff, recontextualized lines of dialogue, and well-rounded characters to tell its time-traveling tale as tautly (and hilariously) as possible. WhileParts IIandIII, shot back-to-backand released within a few months of each other, don’t quite recapture the magic of the original, they significantly raise the stakes by threatening to erase the original movie and they’re just as entertaining.
The second movie is a disturbing vision of a dystopian future (and later a dystopian alternate present) before going back to 1955 to ensure the events of the original film go smoothly. The third movie is nowhere near as confusing, and mixes in tropes of the western genre as Marty McFly goes back to the Old West to save Doc Brown by robbing a train to get the DeLorean up to 88mph. TheBack to the Futuretrilogy can be enjoyed as one long six-hour sci-fi comedy extravaganza.
Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy (2004-2013)
This one is kind of cheating, because none of the movies in the Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy are directly connected to one another. But it is a series of three comedies from the same cast and crew that are each as hilarious and smartly constructed as the last.Writer-director Edgar Wrightand his perfectly matched stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost tackled three different Hollywood movie genres through the lens of dry British comedy in their trio of Cornetto movies.
Shaun of the Deadbrings the structure of a Romero zombie movie to a London pub;Hot Fuzzcombinesa blood-drenched whodunit with a classic “buddy cop” storyin a sleepy village in the English countryside; andThe World’s Endtells aBody Snatchers-style sci-fi story in the midst of five friends’ pub crawl in their hometown. All three of these movies deftly blend genre thrills with relatable everyday situations.
