Just when you thought we’d heard the last of Antonio Banderas’ sexy cat voice, spin-off chapter Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Antonio Banderas) gets a late-in-the-day sequel, 11 years after the last movie featuring the character, and wound up Oscar nominated for its efforts.
There is real competition for the Best Animated Feature Oscar this year — I wouldn’t suggest fucking with Marcel the Shell — but given its strong critical and box office performance, Puss is a plausible winner. It’s a feat more impressive when you remember it’s a spinoff of Shrek, which won the inaugural Academy Award for an animated film back in 2001, and has also aged like milk. The return of Puss in Boots, on the other hand, seems to be doing something truly new, at least with its eye-catching Spider-Verse inspired animation style:
It’s not the only spinoff threatening to unseat the original that spawned it. Spin-offs aren’t sequels — typically, they move a peripheral character into the lead role or introduce new characters and storylines in the universe of the original. Here are a dozen spin-offs that will satisfy even if you’re a newcomer to the series (and in some cases, you’re better off that way).
Logan (2017)
The 20th Century Fox X-Men franchise was our most wildly idiosyncratic superhero series, a two-decade run of movies and TV shows with jarringly different tones, ultimately representing some of the best and worst of the genre. The tenth overall X-movie, and the third to give Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine top billing, this one is the first that truly feels most like a film about real people, even if it’s set in a mildly post-apocalyptic setting and follows characters who are quasi-immortal. Removed from the costumed shenanigans of the other movies in the series (some of which are quite good, mind you), Jackman gives a great performance as a superhero well past his prime, and Patrick Stewart is heartbreaking as the once proud and haughty Charles Xavier, in the late stages of dementia and barely able to use the bathroom on his own. It’s certainly grim and gritty, but not brainlessly so. It’s also about hope for the next generation, and its thematic depth earned it an Oscar nomination for its screenplay.
A Shot in the Dark (1964)
Technically a sequel to 1963’s The Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark also represents a quick course correction from the popular original that starred David Niven as a gentleman jewel thief and Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau as a side character who rather stumbles into a crime caper involving the jewel of the title. With all that sorted, and the unexpectedly popular movie demanding a sequel, writer/director Blake Edwards quickly made A Shot in the Dark, putting Clouseau front and centre and ditching the earlier film’s main characters. It sounds like a terrible idea — giving the comic relief top billing — but the expertly orchestrated silliness of A Shot in the Dark is so fluid that it feels like the movie they should have made in the first place. The comedy wouldn’t work nearly as well in later sequels, so this one remains the best of the overall franchise.
Bumblebee (2018)
The five Michael Bay Transformers movies are a lot — the explosions are big, the mythology is impenetrable, and the human drama is as over-the-top as a season of One Tree Hill, but none of it adds up to much. Michael Bay stepped away from the director’s chair for the most recent movie in the series, which puts the titular Volkswagen Beetle front and centre, and it’s actually the best one since the 2007 original (if you’re being charitable to Bay), or the best ever (if you’re me, a realist). It’s quieter and more character-driven, with an engaging lead performance from Hailee Steinfeld (an Oscar nominee!). Conversely, it’s also a better action movie, avoiding the visual muddle of earlier films, with fight sequences directed in such a way viewers might actually understand what’s going on. Credit, perhaps, goes to director Travis Knight, who made his name carefully composing scenes for stop-motion animation as the head of Laika Studios (Coraline, Kubo and the Two Strings).
Creed (2015)
As a spin-off, Creed might be better than the original Rocky — that’s a big feat, but a massive stone staircase that Ryan Coogler’s film just about climbs. It’s certainly better than any of Rocky’s many sequels (some of which are still pretty good), even as it builds on the formula that they all adhere to. Coogler’s direction is brisk, the film knows when to be funny, and Michael B. Jordan proves he can carry a franchise (one that’s headed to its own threequel). Maybe it’s impressive less for its originality than for managing to lend fresh relevance to the more than four-decade-old franchise.
Deadpool (2016)
Back to X-Men for a moment. Deadpool tacks quite differently from Logan in the way it sets itself apart from that series. While the Hugh Jackman film succeeds by taking itself and its world more seriously, Deadpool stands apart by taking very little seriously at all. There’s just enough of an emotional hook (in Wade Wilson’s relationship with Morena Baccarin’s Vanessa) to keep things from flying too far off the rails, even as Ryan Reynolds’s disfigured super anti-hero winks at/flips off the camera while still managing to be moderately charming. The movie does to great lengths to take the piss out of a film genre that already deserved it — seven years ago.
Birds of Prey (2020)
Even Viola Davis couldn’t save 2016’s Suicide Squad, a forgettable muddle of a movie that didn’t have much to offer beyond Margot Robbie’s lively take on Harley Quinn. So what else to do but give her a spin-off? Director Cathy Yan and writer Christina Hobson give Robbie way more fun, foul-mouthed stuff to do, and surround her with a great cast that includes Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Rosie Perez, Chris Messina, Ella Jay Basco, and Ali Wong. It’s fleet, funny, and stylish, and yet fewer people saw it than just about any other modern DC movie, which is a cryin’ shame, puddin’.
The LEGO Batman Movie
The LEGO Movie was surprisingly delightful, but this Batman-themed spin-off goes harder and goofier without sacrificing the unexpected heart that elevated its predecessor. Without ever slowing down, it takes in the entirety of Batman’s pop culture history and bricks it all together to tell a story about how all the sweet gear and cool brooding in the world can’t replace friends and family.
Rogue One (2016)
It’s nearly impossible, from a 2023 vantage point, to untangle the Star Wars series in such a way as to make clear sense of what qualifies as a sequel or prequel to what, but the very standalone Rogue One certainly counts as a spin-off. Story-wise, it ties in most closely to the original 1977 film, but as a product of modern, Disney-era franchise, I’m calling it a spin-off of The Force Awakens, the movie that kicked-off our era of multiple movies and endless TV shows, some of them good. In all of that, Rogue One sits near the very top of the heap, in part because it introduces new characters that we’d no expectation of ever seeing again (though luckily we got to know Diego Luna’s Andor a lot better), so it doesn’t feel nearly as calculated as those movies more obviously seeding sequels. Rogue One also makes the best use of Darth Vader in decades, separating him from all of the family drama so as to make the character genuinely scary again.
Prey (2022)
I’ll defend the 1987 action spectacle Predator to the end: as a blend of sci-fi, ‘80s-style action, and enough mythology to (eventually) sustain a series, it’s nearly a perfect object. But Prey is something else entirely: a smart, inventive prequel with fewer explosions that nevertheless delivers brilliantly staged action and horror while executing on a killer premise: what if the universe’s greatest hunter visited the Indigenous people’s of North America a few centuries before the first film? While many movies of its kind struggle to balance characterization with action, Prey, in its lead Amber Midthunder, provides a character worth caring about, and understands that tension requires us to slow down occasionally to take note of the stakes. It’s not only the arguable best entry in the series, but a great movie in its own right.
Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015)
You really can’t go wrong with anything Wallace and Gromit related, and 1995’s A Close Shave is among the best of that very excellent lot. Shaun the Sheep is no less silly, nor less delightful, nor less an accomplished piece of stop-motion animation, and loses nothing for being nearly three times the length of that earlier visit with Shaun. A story of sheep on the run has no business being charming for nearly 90 minutes, and for that accomplishment it gets the edge. (The sequel is great too.)
Master Z: Ip Man Legacy (2018)
While the first Ip Man movie from 2008 was based, roughly, on the true life story of the titular Cantonese Wing Chun master (and teacher of Bruce Lee), the series unsurprisingly leans more into fiction as it goes along (it has produced five films so far, all of them rather brilliant modern martial arts spectacles). Master Z is a spin-off of the third film, following that movie’s antagonist Cheung Tin-chi (Max Zhang), now a would-be grocer and part-time mercenary who breaks good and gets involved in stopping a heroin smuggling ring. It’s very much in the vein of the earlier entries, but the martial arts action is just a bit bigger, and more impressively choreographed. Master Z also gets an edge thanks to the presence of Michelle Yeoh as the tough leader of a crime syndicate developing a conscience. Dave Bautista plays the villain.
Night Train to Munich (1940)
Cheating here, slightly, only in that Night Train to Munich isn’t quite as good as its predecessor, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. But it is excellent in its own right, porting over the Charters and Caldicott characters (Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder) from that movie, a not-very-subtly gay-coded couple of cricket enthusiasts introduced as…well, let’s call them “straight men” caught in the middle of a slightly zany espionage plot. Here, the two are similarly unlucky, getting involved in another bit of railway-based espionage, this time taking a bigger part in the action when Nazis try to get their hands on a new design for armour plating. Carol Reed (The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, Oliver!, etc.) directs, and the movie kicked off a run of slightly lesser movies, radio, and TV appearances involving the actors playing these characters, or nearly identical ones when rights issues intervened.