Slow news day. Hopefully things pick up later this afternoon.
In the meantime, I’ve recently grabbed a copy of Tom Shone’s book “The Nolan Variations,” and it’s quite the read, probably the best book ever written about Christopher Nolan.I happened to stumble around a quote that had me chuckling.
Chatting about “The Dark Knight Rises,” Nolan admits his initial reluctance at directing the third ‘Batman’ film because he didn’t believe there were many, if any, strong threequels out there, with the exception of “Rocky III” …
There are no good third sequels, maybe Rocky III. But they are very difficult. So my instinct was to change genres. The first one is an origin story. The second one is a crime drama very much like Heat, and the third one, we needed to blow up bigger, because you can’t scale down […] We went for the historical epic, the disaster film, The Towering Inferno meets Doctor Zhivago.
It is indeed one of the hardest feats in commercial cinema to achieve: producing a third instalment that feels worthy and non-disposable. It’s happened, albeit not quite often, that the third film in a series does end up being great.
Off the top of my head, this is the list I came up with (“Rocky III” isn’t included):
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Goldfinger
The Godfather Part III
Toy Story 3
Before Midnight
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
The Dark Knight Rises
War for the Planet of the Apes
Lady Vengeance
The Return of the Jedi
Army of Darkness