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 Parents and The Hangover are a pair of comedy masterpieces, but the third entries in their respective franchises are borderline unwatchable. From the Back to the Future trilogy to the Three Flavors Cornetto trilogy, 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 comedy Clerks. 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 like Chasing Amy and unwatchable duds like Cop Out. But he always brought his A-game to the Clerks sequels.
Clerks II transplanted the original movie’s day-in-the-life formula to a fast food restaurant, while Clerks 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 as Police 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 with The Naked Gun series. Leslie Nielsen reprised his role as bumbling detective Frank Drebin in the trilogy of hard-boiled noir spoofs.
Neither of the two sequels – The Naked Gun 2 1⁄2: The Smell of Fear and Naked 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 and the tropes of the James Bond franchise with his 1997 gem Austin 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 of the megalomania of the average Bond villain.
The sequels both shook up the formula – The Spy Who Shagged Me sent Austin back to the ‘60s, then Goldmember introduced 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 Future is 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. While Parts II and III, shot back-to-back and 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. The Back to the Future trilogy 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 Wright and 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 Dead brings the structure of a Romero zombie movie to a London pub; Hot Fuzz combines a blood-drenched whodunit with a classic “buddy cop” story in a sleepy village in the English countryside; and The World’s End tells a Body 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.