Not every sequel is a cash grab. These ten justified themselves.
1. Top Gun: Maverick (2022) — Proved that practical stunts, practical stakes, and a star willing to actually fly a jet still matter. The best blockbuster of the decade so far.
2. Creed III (2023) — Michael B. Jordan’s directorial debut stripped the Rocky formula to its emotional skeleton and made it Japanese — Creed vs Damian is essentially Haiku as a boxing match.
3. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) — The train sequence alone earns its place in the canon. Cruise is building his own monument, one stunt at a time.
4. Alien: Earth (2025) — The first Alien television series shouldn’t have worked. Noah Hawley made it work by refusing to let the Xenomorphs be the point.
5. Dune: Part Two (2024) — Villeneuve completed his adaptation without compromise. Austere, epic, and genuinely strange. It’s a film about the manufacture of a messiah and it never lets you forget that.
6. Glass Onion (2022) — Rian Johnson proved the first Knives Out wasn’t a fluke. The mystery is secondary; the satire of tech-bro self-mythology is the real subject.
7. Scream (2022) — The fifth film used the franchise’s own meta-awareness as a weapon. The commentary on “requels” and toxic fandom is the sharpest the series has ever been.
8. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) — The sequel that made the original look like a warm-up. No animated film has looked or moved like this before.
9. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) — An animated children’s film that is genuinely, seriously about the fear of death. The Wolf sequence terrified adults more than the kids it was made for.
10. Mad Max: Furiosa (2024) — George Miller expanding his own mythology without repeating himself. Darker, longer, stranger than Fury Road, and content to be.
