If Hollywood has proven anything over the last century, it’s that they will turn anything into a franchise if they think it will make them a buck. They made a sequel to Speed on a cruise ship. They made a Karate Kid without the title character. They made four films about a hungry shark, even though the shark died at the end of every single movie.
If they’ll make sequels like those, then it should come as no surprise that they have made quite a few sequels out of Academy Award winners for Best Picture. After all, a Best Picture Oscar is practically a guarantor of long-term financial success. It means a boost at the box office then far more sales and rentals on home video. It means that as long as people watch movies, they’ll watch your movie. You can’t buy that kind of name-brand recognition — but you can use it to make sequels.
To date, 17 of the 100-ish Academy Award Best Picture winners since the Oscars began have earned at least one sequel. (A couple have become trilogies; one turned into a franchise that continues to crank out new installments to this day.) Surprisingly, despite Hollywood’s increasingly intense obsession with IP, it’s been almost 20 years since a Best Picture winner yielded a sequel. You know what that means: Any day now they’re going to announce Everything Everywhere All at Twice.
Oscar Best Picture Winners That Got Sequels
These big awards winners were popular enough to get their own sequels. Some of those sequels were hits. Others were not.
READ MORE: The Best and Worst Oscar Best Picture Winners in History
People Who Won Oscars To Make Up For Awards They Should Have Won in the Past
Sometimes, we can speculate that the Academy awards certain performances not because they’re the best, but because they should have won long before.
