Who is the highest-grossing director in cinema history to never make a sequel?
Posted On
(Credits: Far Out)
It feels almost antiquated in an age of risk-averse blockbusters, the very idea that a director can win big box office success without wading into the realm of the fraught sequel.
In an age of franchise reboots, extended universes, and nostalgia-driven ‘reimaginings’, the inexorable pull toward a perfunctory part two for a global movie smash seems almost hopelessly certain. Sequels are nothing new, but a peruse across the top-grossing directors of all time reveals a consistent respective filmography littered with ‘IIs’, ‘volume threes’, or ‘Returns’ tacked at the end of their big titles.
In fact, one has to scroll down 61 filmmakers, from Steven Spielberg’s $10billion number one position through Hollywood’s heavyweights like James Cameron, Michael Bay, and Christopher Nolan, to CGI critter creators Mike Mitchell, responsible for Kung Fu Panda 4.
It takes a while to glean a director with a core body of work unblemished by a sequel revisit. A few get close, with Ridley Scott showing a seriously good run from his 1977 debut The Duellists, signing up to 2001’s Hannibal after Jonathan Demme’s cannibal original ten years earlier, before demystifying his Alien masterpiece with the Prometheus let-down and its even more silly Alien: Covenant follow-up.
Clint Eastwood initially appears, 29th in the box office sellers, to enjoy an oeuvre entirely founded on original work. Pedants will point out his 2006 war double-act Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, both released two months apart from each other, intended as a dual perspective of the US Forces and Imperial Japanese experience of the Iwo Jima island’s military capture, yet, Eastwood had actually stepped behind the camera for 1983’s Sudden Impact, the fourth entry in his hard-boiled Dirty Harry cop series.
If M Night Shyamalan springs to mind, it’s an understandable choice, as he won some serious commercial success from the get-go with 1999’s twisty supernatural drama The Sixth Sense, continuing to enjoy box office wins with his own original property before petering out by the late 2000s with dross like The Happening and The Last Airbender. Still, nobly soldiering on with unique entries to his filmography, Shyamalan slipped in a ‘sequel by stealth’ with Split and the more overtly successive Glass, both tying up a trilogy to 2000’s superhero drama Unbreakable.
Smack bang on number 60 is New Hollywood titan Martin Scorsese, and surely the maestro of contemporary cinema hasn’t succumbed to the commercial allure of the sequel? Well, Scorsese dipped his toe, directing both a young Tom Cruise and vintage Paul Newman in 1986’s The Color of Money, a follow-up to 1961’s pool classic The Hustler.
The ship’s well and truly sailed now, but Robert De Niro did let slip on his 1998 Inside the Actors Studio appearance that he and Scorsese had mooted the idea of a Taxi Driver revisit, seeing how alienated loner Travis Bickle was doing as a middle-aged man navigating a very different New York City after its urban clean-up.
So, who is the highest-grossing director to never make a sequel?
One of China’s most successful directors, Zhang Yimou, sits at number 62 of the global gross rankings, counting over $2.2billion in worldwide ticket sales across his 29 features. To Western audiences, he’s most remembered as the director of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games, as well as 2004’s House of Flying Daggers wuxia martial arts drama.
To date, Yimou counts no official sequels among his litany of features, but this might not last long, as plans are reportedly underway to direct sequels to 2016’s The Great Wall monster fantasy and 2021’s Cliff Walkers spy thriller.
[embedded content]
Related Topics
