The Genre of Trilogy

So apparently Lord of the Rings is the best movie trilogy ever.

Or at least that’s what the eight people who voted on my office-door bracket think. Lord of the Rings barely beat out the original Star Wars trilogy in a tournament that included The Dark Knight trilogy, Mad Max, Toy Story, the Star Wars prequels, the Before… series, Raimi’s Spider-Man, Indiana Jones, Bourne, the Dollars trilogy, The Godfather, The Matrix, Back to the Future, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Evil Dead. Yes, I’m aware there’s a bunch of other great trilogies that should have been included—there’s a half dozen superhero trilogies that could have made the list, a few animated and (surprisingly) comedy series that would work, or if you want something artsier, maybe Three Colours or the Apu Trilogy—but I only have so much time to dedicate to office-door brackets.

Despite the small number of voters, I suspect the bracket’s conclusion reflects a growing consensus. Over the last five years, I’ve noticed a trend in high praise for Peter Jackson’s trilogy, that those films stand as some sort of special achievement in the history of cinema, a unique blend of epic scale and dramatic elegance. But as remarkable as the Lord of the Rings is, there are still other contenders—it was, after all, a close finals with Star Wars, and many others are frequently included in the conversation for greatest-of-all-time. At least one voter was adamant that the Dollars trilogy should have been the winner. I’m also partial, among those that didn’t make the tournament, to the newer Planet of the Apes, the Cornetto trilogy, and most of all the Ocean’s movies (which, depending on the day, is to my mind the best movie series ever made).

But more than I want to talk about which trilogy is greatest, this recent bracket has reignited my interest in the genre of trilogy. To speak of trilogy as genre is, admittedly, awkward. It is not a genre like comedy or fantasy, but it does contain patterns and tropes and to make a trilogy is to commit oneself to a certain kind of storytelling.

As a genre, trilogies have existed for some time. We can look all the way back to Greek plays, to something like the Oedipus Cycle we read in school, or much later to a work like Dante’s Divine Comedy, split into Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. In film, while there were many ongoing series and the occasional closed trilogy, to have a sequel at all was not generally respected until Coppola released The Godfather Part II. A few years later, George Lucas would write The Empire Strikes Back, and later The Return of the Jedi, and thereby completely revolutionized how the industry (and regular moviegoers) thought about movie series. Although many episodic trilogies would continue to be made (as with the Dollars trilogy that predates Star Wars), there was a marked shift toward serialized storytelling. And even as the length of movie series continued to expand, particularly in the wake of the MCU, the trilogy remains a special genre, beyond the duality of a simple sequel but still concise enough to feel contained.

The merits of a trilogy are fairly obvious. From an economic standpoint, why sell tickets for one movie when you can sell tickets for three? (You see how the logic here eventually led to the splitting of final books into two movies and really to the entire cinematic landscape at this point.) More importantly, stretching a story out over three installments not only allows for increased character development and world-building, but purely by separating sections of the story creators can achieve a sense of epic scope. And while these benefits exist for any series, a trilogy is uniquely special by its leveraging of the uniquely special number three. Trilogies operate by a Hegelian logic that promise catharsis in its final resolution, magnifying the three-act structure of any individual movie over the course of the series (and yet, for any good trilogy, not losing sight of that structure at the individual level).

Of course, with these advantages come unique difficulties for the trilogy. Movies that take on this structure must balance between the familiar and the new—not deviating too much from what has been established, lest all resemblance be lost, but also not merely repeating what has come before, and thereby risking boredom. Along these lines, it is crucially important that the individual movies within a trilogy not feel like wheel-spinning, that they are self-contained stories that propel the overall plot, even as the overall plot exists singularly above those movies and is at constant risk of stalling. Most of all, trilogies by their scope face a special difficulty in landing the plane. The more time audiences spend with a set of characters in a particular world, the more they have at stake emotionally in the conclusion of that story. It’s a high bar to clear, but when it’s done right, there’s few feelings as rewarding.

This recent bracket was not the first time I’ve spent too long thinking about trilogies. A while back, I took a survey of coworkers for how they viewed different movie trilogies. They ranked each movie in a series of three, which, adjusted slightly, resulted in the following figures. The findings mainly demonstrate which movie in a series is generally seen as the best and how even or uneven a series is.

Right off the bat, we notice that Lord of the Rings is the most balanced trilogy; that folks had a hard time picking which of the three movies was the best. In terms of failure, we see that the Matrix trilogy was the most uneven, with the first one universally loved and the other two clearly inferior, and similarly, Pirates of the Caribbean sees the most noticeable decline by the third movie. Conversely, the Prequels have the most dramatic redemption arc across the three movies.

Notably, two of the most even series in the dataset were also the two most beloved series in the bracket: Lord of the Rings and the original Star Wars. Not that the individual installments in these series are anything less than great, but this might suggest that people highly value consistency: that is, even if I could argue that the first Matrix movie is better than any individual movie represented those series, that does not guarantee The Matrix trilogy a place alongside more consistently good series. Another observation—again, mostly reading from the success of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars in the bracket—is that serialized stories seem preferred to more episodic trilogies.

But most noticeable to me is that, with the exception of the Prequels and The Lord of the Rings, most trilogies decline in quality. While there is a special joy in a trilogy that sticks the landing, reflecting on the trends across these films is more a sobering exercise. I see in these numbers the reality that our stories rarely live up to our expectations. I can’t say exactly why that is. It might be due to the cynical tactics of Hollywood or the sheer difficulty of creative work. It may be reflective of our collective, disappointed psychology. But I worry, it may be, more so, a pointer to a disappointing reality, that the things we want to love we find are, often, not what we hoped they’d be.