From the wild thrills of Die Hard to the beautiful chaos of John Wick, a notable number of the best action movies of all time either launched franchises or are sequels to excellent originals, but just because a film never inspired a follow-up story doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact, cinema history is filled with excellent action blockbusters that exist independently of series.
In an effort to prove that point, we’ve put together this feature highlighting 32 special movies – all of them great and none of them to date producing a sequel.
Attack The Block
To be fair, there were reports in 2021 that writer/director Joe Cornish was reuniting with John Boyega for an Attack The Block 2… but it’s been more than three years without an update, and so we’re including this excellent 2011 thriller featuring a teenage street gang battling against freaky alien invaders.
Commando
How is it possible that the world was never graced with another performance from Arnold Schwarzenegger as John Matrix – the elite special forces colonel who can lift logs five times his weight and easily turn the tables on elite mercenaries who are both out for revenge and executing a coup in South America? The lack of a Commando 2 is proof that the movie gods don’t always play fair.
Con Air
It would be difficult to assemble a cast of supporting actors quite as amazing as the one featured in 1997’s Con Air (and most of the characters die in the mile-high prison break movie), which makes it understandable that we’ve never seen a sequel get made, but it does feel like a shame that we’ve never seen Nicolas Cage let his hair waft in the breeze as Cameron Poe again.
Danger: Diabolik
There was a European Diabolik animated TV series and a 2021 Diabolik film based on the same source material as Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik – but the 1968 movie stands alone in its own canon, and it’s a shame because the film is outrageously cool. If you aren’t familiar with this adventure centered on a daring master thief (John Phillip Law) evading a detective (Michel Piccoli) with a dangerous gangster (Adolfo Celi) under this thumb, you are missing out on a stylish classic of the action genre.
District 9
There was a lot of talk for a long time about writer/director Neill Blomkamp returning to the world of his directorial debut… but until he does, we can independently enjoy the excellence that is District 9: a film that pairs impressive political commentary with some thrilling action and some freaky body horror.
Face/Off
Paramount Pictures has previously announced plans for a Face/Off sequel, the most recent developments happening in 2021 with Adam Wingard attached to direct – but for now, there is only one movie in cinematic history where Nicolas Cage and John Travolta undergo radical surgery and swap faces.
The Fifth Element
Bruce Willis played John McClane five times on the big screen during his career, but we sadly only got one adventure with him as the unexpectedly heroic flying taxi driver Korben Dallas. It’s a shame, because The Fifth Element establishes an outrageously stylistic world with incredible potential for original stories.
In The Line Of Fire
Frank Horrigan is one of the most memorable characters in Clint Eastwood’s career, but it was a cinematic one-off. In The Line Of Fire has a strong legacy as one of the best secret service-centric movies too, with John Malkovich’s Mitch Leary/James Carney/Booth attempting to execute an insidious and scary assassination plot with his homemade composite zip gun.
The Last Dragon
While The Last Dragon never produced a sequel, its true legacy is the awesome cult audience that it has grown since its release in the mid-1980s. Taimak’s Leroy Green, a.k.a. Bruce Leeroy, is an undisputed legend among sects of the action movie fanbase, Julius Carry’s turn as Sho'nuff, The Shogun of Harlem, is unforgettable.
Last Action Hero
Director John McTiernan’s Last Action Hero taps an amazing satire vein taking aim at the tropes of action blockbusters, but we sadly only got one adventure with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Jack Slater. It was arguably a movie before its time, but Schwarzenegger has called it the most underrated of his career, and it’s a shame that we never got a Last Action Hero 2.
The Long Kiss Good Night
In a cinematic age when a lot of different actors are getting their so-called “John Wick moment” – be it Bob Odenkirk in Nobody or Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Kate – there should be a lot more retroactive appreciation for Renny Harlin’s fantastic The Long Kiss Goodnight – in which Beetlejuice and A League Of Their Own star Geena Davis transforms into a killer of the highest caliber.
The Last Boy Scout
The Last Boy Scout teases the audience with the idea of Joe Hannenbeck (Bruce Willis) and Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans) teaming up as a partners in the private investigators game… but the story of their next adventure together never got told. It’s a shame, as I would have been delighted to these two characters crack wise and kick butt in a dozen movies together.
Pineapple Express
We’re obviously not counting the gag in This Is The End here. That being said, the characters and the world in Pineapple Express are terrific, and it would be wonderful to see Seth Rogen’s Dale Denton and Danny McBride’s unkillable Red on a new strange adventure together.
The Rocketeer
As a kid, I could never comprehend how a big screen sequel to The Rocketeer didn’t exist. The Joe Johnston-directed film has incredible style and energy, bringing the style of 1940s comics to life with a phenomenal cast including Billy Campbell, Alan Arkin, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Sorvino, Terry O’Quinn, Ed Lauter, Jon Polito, Margo Martindale and Timothy Dalton.
Rumble In The Bronx
From Police Story to Project A to Drunken Master to Rush Hour, there are many Jackie Chan-centric franchises, but there is only one Rumble In The Bronx. The Stanley Tong film features some of Chan’s most incredible stunt and fight work, and it’s dazzling no matter how many times you watch it.
Heat
It’s true that a sequel to Heat exists in book form, and there has been talk about Heat 2 being adapted as a movie… but until that film actually comes together, we’re keeping Heat on this list, because it most certainly qualifies within this feature’s parameters. Cinematic heists don’t get more epic than Michael Mann’s star-studded masterpiece, which delivers the ultimate showdown between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.
The Other Guys
It’s a shame for many reasons that Adam McKay and Will Ferrell are no longer collaborating on projects, but one is that it likely means that we’ll never see the return of Ferrell’s Allen Gamble and Mark Wahlberg’s Terry Hoitz in an Other Guys sequel. The 2010 comedy was sold as a parody of big cop movies, but it actually features a number of impressive, large scale set pieces and unfurls a compelling financial scheme in the plotting.
Inception
Outside of The Dark Knight Trilogy, writer/director Christopher Nolan has never been big on sequels – but if he were to ever return to one of the worlds he has created, Inception would be an exciting choice. The mind-bending experience of traveling through dreams is brilliantly illustrated in the 2010 action movie, and it would be exciting to see what other stories could be told with the special technology that’s introduced.
Team America: World Police
It would have arguably been a touch hypocritical for Trey Parker and Matt Stone to develop a Team America: World Police 2 given how the film satirizes blockbuster moviemaking… but it’s also not a movie that needs a sequel. It exists perfectly as a one-of-a-kind entity: a major studio-produced feature starring a collection of obscene puppets blowing up major landmarks around the world.
The Running Man
If there is an award for Movie With The Best Arnold Schwarzenegger One-Liners, The Running Man would be a strong contender if not the hands-down winner. It’s a movie that stretches its Stephen King source material to some extreme limits (changing just about everything about the book it’s based on), but it spins a wild, stylish and prescient adventure that sees Schwarzenegger’s Ben Richards topple a totalitarian TV network.
Dredd
Not to be confused with the 1995 film Judge Dredd starring Sylvester Stallone, 2012’s Dredd starring Karl Urban is an exceptionally cool action movie experience that plays like a video game as a pair of cops work their way up through a high-rise in an effort to take down a powerful drug lord pushing a drug called Slo-mo. It’s a perfect adaptation of John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra's comic and has found an audience since its initial release… but it was unfortunately a box office disappoint during its big screen run.
Edge Of Tomorrow
Emily Blunt has thrown cold water on the idea of an Edge Of Tomorrow 2 in recent years, but fans aren’t totally ready to give up. After all, the first movie is a stellar execution of a time loop plot, and Tom Cruise and Blunt make a terrific big screen pair (with the former doing a wonderful job at the start of the film playing a true jerk).
True Lies
James Cameron is best known for making some of the best sci-fi movies of all time and his deep love of the ocean, but one of his underappreciated works doesn’t fit into either of those categories. Cameron’s last film before Titanic and launching the Avatar franchise, True Lies is both a wonderful action romp and a fun caper, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis making a fantastic pair in the silly, epic plot.
Hard Boiled
Chow Yun-fat made some awesome movies with John Woo, but arguably the pinnacle of their collaboration is the story of a renegade cop who goes after the gun smugglers responsible for the murder of his partner. Hard Boiled is crazy, extremely violent, and landmark action cinema.
Big Trouble In Little China
John Carpenter’s legacy is as a Master of Horror, but not to be forgotten are his great contributions to action cinema. Escape From New York doesn’t qualify for this feature due to the existence of Escape From L.A., but Kurt Russell’s one-time adventure as truck driver Jack Burton through a fantastical world that exists in San Francisco’s Chinatown most definitely does. It was a box office bomb when it came out, but Big Trouble In Little China has been delighting movie fans since 1986 and found the audience it deserves.
Coffy
Coffy is one of the great films of the blaxpoitation genre, and while Foxy Brown is technically a reworked version of the script that was going to be a sequel, there isn’t a canon connection between the movies, so we’re counting it. The feature is a classic revenge tale led by the great Pam Grier – who plays a character who has properly become recognized as an iconic female protagonist.
The Warriors
If one were to watch director Walter Hill’s The Warriors without knowing anything about it, you might actually think that it was the middle chapter of a franchise – but that really just speaks to the immersiveness of the world it establishes full of warring gangs on the streets of New York. Hill or another filmmaker might try to expand the story someday in the future with a legacyquel or some such project, but for now, there is only one The Warriors.
Point Break
I can imagine that some of you reading this list are doing so just to check and make sure that I included Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break. There was that forgettable remake of the film that was released in 2015, but the crime/action adventure starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze is otherwise and in many ways singular.
Bullitt
Directed by Peter Yates, Bullitt is one of the all-time great car movies, led by Steve McQueen in one of his most iconic roles, but it’s notably the only time that the actor got to play Lieutenant Frank Bullitt – despite there being obvious franchise potential.
Enter The Dragon
Enter The Dragon is one of the best martial arts movies ever made and arguably the best film in Bruce Lee’s all too short career. Not only does it feature some stellar action sequences that put Lee’s incredible skills on display, it’s also an exciting crime thriller that sees Lee become an undercover agent in a martial arts school run by a drug kingpin.
Six-String Samurai
Director Lance Mungia’s Six-String Samurai is such a strange film, it’s not exactly surprising that it never inspired a sequel. That being said, it is a terrific post-apocalyptic vision full of big ideas that sees a character modeled after Buddy Holly making his way across the wasteland left in the wake of the Soviet Union nuking America.
The Way Of The Dragon
The Way Of The Dragon is part of a classic cinematic tradition that sees an outsider who becomes a hero to desperate strangers, but what ultimately makes it special is the endlessly impressive skills of Bruce Lee. Also, it’s the only title in his filmography where you get to see him show off his martial arts abilities against Chuck Norris at the Colosseum in Rome.
