We’ve come along way since “Scream 2” declared, with all the confidence of a stuck-up film student, that “sequels suck.” Once upon a time feature film follow-ups were, typically, cynical cash-grabs, made with less time, money and ambition, just to make an easy buck. But now a lot of our sequels are optimistic cash-grabs made with more time, money and ambition, and with some regularity, some these sequels actually turn out great.
They’re not all great, of course. “Captain America: Brave New World,” “Tron: Ares” and the non-actiony parts of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” were pretty tough sits. But quite a few sequels this year improved on the original, and/or added something new to the franchise, and/or were a heck of a lot of fun. These are the films that proved those snooty film students wrong in 2025.
‘Another Simple Favor’
You won’t find many twistier, turnier, or funnier thrillers than Paul Feig’s “A Simple Favor,” released seven years ago to widespread critic acclaim and, sadly, mediocre box office. The film, about a perfect suburban mom seduced into a life of luxury — and murder — by her alluring, extremely well-dressed neighbor, was a tough act to follow, and a follow-up was no sure thing in the first place.
“Another Simple Favor” was worth the wait, not because it was as tightly constructed as the original — because plot-wise, it’s actually pretty sloppy — but because Kendrick and Lively have perfect chemistry. You’re never sure if they’re going to kiss each other or kill each other, and they’d probably prefer to do both. It’s a welcome return to the first film’s winking tone and, even better, its absurdly on-point costumes. Whoever put Blake Lively in that ridiculous hat deserves an Oscar.
‘Castration Movie Anthology ii. The Best of Both Worlds’
If you saw another movie like “Castration Movie Anthology ii. The Best of Both Worlds” in 2025… no you didn’t. There’s no way in hell you saw a movie like “Castration Movie ii.” If this isn’t the only five-hour movie about a trans woman escaping a YouTube influencer/A.I. cult that’s obsessed with hot dogs and then falling in love with an abrasive ex-non-binary woman in Bushwick, you’re going to need to show your work, because I do not believe you.
Louise Weard’s first “Castration Movie” was one of the best films of the decade, and the sequel is completely unexpected, a massive shift in genre that asks extremely difficult questions about individual and group identity in this age of persecution and misunderstood gender dynamics. It’s also punk rock as hell, with a story that waffles from extremely realistic and personal to extremely perverse and surreal, all united by Ward’s fascinating and daring low-fidelity, high ambition aesthetic, which captures the tale in a series of extended takes that seem damn near impossible to pull off at this scale, or almost any other.
“Castration Movie Anthology ii. The Best of Both Worlds” isn’t for everybody — a lot of audiences probably couldn’t handle its length, let alone its challenging conversations about hot button topics — but it’s one of the most interesting ongoing artworks of the decade, and the first sequel is, like the original, a must-see for all lovers of independent cinema.
‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’
Compared to a lot of the sequels on our list, “Final Destination Bloodlines” may not seem like it’s about a whole lot. Like every other installment of the series, it’s the story of a group of people who should have died already, and how Death — the abstract concept, who not only has agency but also a cruel sense of humor — kills them in absurdly elaborate ways. So now they live in perpetual fear of the inevitable, while doing everything they can to extend their own lives. On the surface that’s a contrived scary movie concept. At its core, however, these “Final Destination” movies represent an ongoing dichotomy between existentialism and fatalism, where the former is only possible by outwitting the latter.
Yes, yes, so it’s all a big college philosophy paper. It’s also wicked gross. “Final Destination Bloodlines” is one Grand Guignol, absurdly theatrical death scene after another, presented like Rube Goldberg machines, if Goldberg made them while chugging amphetamines as if they were Skittles. Even the worst “Final Destination” movies have fun, gory gags, and “Bloodlines” is the best of the lot, with unforgettable gross and hilarious death scenes, grounded by a genuine sense of tragedy, thanks to a cast of characters we actually give a damn about. It’s deceptively simple, high octane entertainment, and the effort that went into this particular installment is inspiring.
‘Influencers’
In a perfect world, Kurtis David Harder’s “Influencer” would have been a huge hit in 2022, with its twisted and sinister approach to modern social media culture, and the love/hate relationship we have with its stars. But it was a cult favorite, thanks largely to the slithery performance from Cassandra Naud, as a murderer and con artist named CW, who targets women with a huge Instagram following and steals their lives.
“Influencers” takes us deeper into CW’s obsessive psyche, introducing her one true love, and setting one of her would-be victims on a globe-trotting mission to bring her to justice. Along the way, CW also infiltrates the lives of a misogynistic manosphere icon and his ultra-conservative girlfriend, whose lives are rapidly obliterated. Writer/director Harder has an incredibly dark sense of humor, and a freaky sense of karmic justice, which leads the biting “Influencers” to a memorable, over the top conclusion that steers this potential franchise into the realm of glorious camp.
‘M3GAN 2.0’
Gerard Johnstone’s “M3GAN” was the A.I. version of “Gremlins,” where a seemingly benign new addition to the family — in this case, a sophisticated toy robot — runs amok and kills everybody, all with a demonic, quirky sense of humor. It was awesome, it was a blockbuster, and now it’s got a sequel that’s basically the A.I. version of “Gremlins 2: The New Batch,” with wild new ideas and hilarious gags that push the concept about as far as it can possibly go.
It turns out M3GAN (Amie Donald, voiced by Jenna Davis) is back, and still trying to protect Cady (Violet McGraw) from every threat imaginable. Except this time the threat is another killer robot, AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), who is on a quest to destroy the human world. So it’s up to M3GAN and her creator/former would-be murder victim, Gemma (Allison Williams) to team up and save the day, in a story that starts out weird and gets even stranger as it goes. “M3GAN 2.0” is weird, it’s witty, and it’s everything you could possibly want from a “M3GAN” sequel. So naturally it bombed at the box office, turning the future of this franchise into a great big question mark. Sigh.
‘Ne Zha 2’
The highest-grossing film of 2025, by such a substantial margin that even “Avatar: Fire and Ash” might have trouble catching up, is also the highest-grossing animated film in history. “Ne Zha 2” barely got released in America because it’s a Chinese production, based on a 16th century Chinese novel, and the sequel to a movie that also barely got released in the U.S., and distributors didn’t think audiences would go for that sort of thing. (Whoops.)
That being said, “Ne Zha 2” has all the elements American filmgoers love, like jaw-dropping action — the gigantic climax is nearly an hour long, and never stops reinventing itself — and potty humor. Lots and lots of potty humor. “Ne Zha 2” is the kind of film when a young martial arts expert will accidentally make everyone drink his urine, and then an hour later he’s weeping sincerely over the loss of his loved ones, and trying to kill every dragon in the world in bitter, hateful revenge. Tonally, it’s a lot of whiplash, but for sheer spectacle “Ne Zha 2” delivers like no other film in 2025. (You might want to see the original first, though, since the filmmakers assume you did, and they don’t spend a lot of time catching their audience up.)
‘Predator: Badlands’
“Predator: Badlands” isn’t the first great sequel to completely redefine the franchise, but it may be the first sequel to do it nearly 40 years later. After almost four decades of films about aliens hunting humans for sport, all from humanity’s perspective, director Dan Trachtenberg completely flipped the script and made a movie from the Predator’s perspective. What’s more, he made the Predator a noble hero, and he made humanity, by way of the A.I. we created to pursue our heartless goals, the villain. And not only does “Predator: Badlands” work, despite the complete reversal of a classic formula, it’s one of the best films of the series. (Give it some time. It’ll probably get that #1 spot eventually.)
What makes “Predator: Badlands” such a game-changer is that, in spite of the total reversal of the formula, it’s everything “Predator” movie always was. It’s the story of a mighty hunter, on a strangely different planet, tracking prey who won’t go down easily. It’s the story about machismo, in which a protagonist who considers themselves a badass finds out they’re not the center of the universe, and learns to solve their problems in a smarter, and in this case more sensitive way.
Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) learns to care about other people in the middle of his epic journey in “Predator: Badlands,” thanks to an android named Thia (Elle Fanning, giving an award-worthy performance), but not because he’s becoming a pacifist. It turns out that eschewing toxic masculinity makes you even stronger and deadlier, and more noble. That’s one hell of an arc. No wonder “Predator: Badlands” elevates the franchise. It gives us everything we want, from a brand new perspective, and completely revitalizes the series in the process.
‘Sisu: Road to Revenge’
Jalmari Helander is — I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — the best genre filmmaker most Americans don’t know about. His Christmas horror classic “Rare Exports” and his “Die Hard in a Forest with a Little Kid Protecting President Samuel L. Jackson from Assassins” classic “Big Game” should speak for themselves. But apparently his biggest hit in the U.S. was “Sisu,” a 2022 Finnish action movie about an old man, played by Jorma Tommila, killing Nazi scum at the end of World War II. It was big, it was brassy, it was gloriously, fist-pumpingly patriotic.
The sequel finds our hero, Aatami Korpi, trying to rebuild his life after the Russians annexed a swath of Finland. He crosses the border, disassembled his house log by log, and tries to drive it home in a giant truck. But the Soviets, who also made an enemy of Aatami, won’t let him leave, sending wave after wave of soldiers, trucks and fighter jets to take him out in a frantic high speed car chase that’s half “Mad Max: Fury Road” and half Bugs Bunny cartoon. “Sisu: Road to Revenge” doesn’t have the same “oomph” as the original but action movies didn’t get much better in 2025. So genre fans, whatever you do, don’t miss it.
’28 Years Later’
Danny Boyle revitalized the whole zombie genre with his 2002 horror classic “28 Days Later,” introducing the concept of “fast zombies,” and cramming the themes of George A. Romero’s first three genre-defining classics — “Night of the Living Dead,” “Dawn of the Dead” and “Day of the Dead” — into a single, densely-packed, contemporarily relevant narrative. And now, over two decades later, after the premise has flourished and mutated, he’s back and showing the rest of us how it’s done. Again.
“28 Years Later” doesn’t introduce a brand new wrinkle into the zombie concept (even the possibly that zombies could be rehabilitated was previous explored by, you guessed it, George A. Romero), but it feels radical anyway, because it dares to suggest there’s a possibility for hope, even in a society that’s been obliterated. Literally or figuratively, that resonates today. Especially in the wake of COVID-19, when everyone in the world was simultaneously traumatized, and forced to live with the constant threat and reality of death — and especially after some people convinced themselves, or let others do it for them, that those deaths weren’t a big deal.
“28 Years Later’s” philosophical and spiritual ideas hit hard, and raise questions not about humanity’s survival, but about how humanity deals with mortality. Have we become so inured to violence and horror that we no longer care about what it all means, and how it defines us? These are big questions for a movie to ask, especially when it’s also full of Robin Hood archery action sequences with the living dead, and a whole heck of a lot of zombie genitals just flapping away, doing their thing, like that’s not in any way distracting.
‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’
Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” movies — which should really be called “Benoit Blanc” movies, but the branding gods have already spoken — are a miracle in today’s big budget marketplace. All three installments are fiercely intelligent mysteries, venomous social satires, and as entertaining as any high-flying action movie. “Knives Out” was great, “Glass Onion” was arguably better,” and “Wake Up Dead Man” bests them all.
Josh O’Connor stars as Father Jud Deplenticy, a priest trying to move on from his history of violence, who gets assigned to a small parish run like a cult, and with an iron fist, by Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin). Unlike most murder mysteries, where everyone has a motive to kill the victim, everyone in “Wake Up Dead Man” seems to live Wicks except for our Father Jud, who immediately becomes the sole suspect. That’s when Benoit Blanc shows up to solve the mystery, exonerate (or possibly accuse) Father Jud, and… learn about the healing power of Catholicism despite his atheistic worldview and the church’s endless controversies and unforgivable crimes?
Yeah, on top of all the wonderfully fun locked room murder mystery shenanigans, “Wake Up Dead Man” does a better job than almost any other modern movie of interrogating the value of religion in a secular society. What’s more, it comes to meaningful, soulful, but hardly pious conclusions. Johnson’s film illustrates the push and pull between sin and salvation even-handedly, never forgetting the church’s sins, and never arguing entirely against the tender, conflicted hearts of the truly godly. It’s not just a great all-star murder mystery. It’s a great film of any kind.
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