With Marvel’s “Iron Man 3” on the horizon (May 3) and two other threequels coming down the pike later this summer (“The Hangover Part III” and Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight”), the staff here at HitFix thought it might be fun to count down some of our most beloved movie trilogies of all time. Little did we realize then how difficult the process of choosing our favorites would be, for not only are there a number of narrative trilogies worthy of consideration (“Lord of the Rings,” “Star Wars,” “The Dark Knight,” et al.) but an even greater number of thematic ones – Park chan-Wook’s “Vengeance” trilogy and Krzysztof Kie?lowski’s “Three Colors” being just two of the most prominent examples.
Nevertheless, we somehow managed to whittle the list down to eleven (the odd number resulting from a tie in our staff voting procedure), discarding from consideration along the way any franchises that had – in many cases unfortunately – gone beyond three films (“Indiana Jones,” “Alien,” etc.) while letting slide other such examples (i.e. the original “Star Wars” trilogy) we felt qualified for the standalone treatment.
Check out all our picks in the gallery below, then vote for your own favorite trilogy in the poll further down the page.