Every sequel nominated for Best Picture

Ten sequels have been nominated for Best Picture and two of them won: The Godfather Part II and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Dune: Part Three opens on 18 December 2026 and is one of the favourites for the 99th Academy Awards. Nominations are announced on 21 January 2027 and the ceremony is on 14 March.

Years below are the film years, as the Academy counts them. The Godfather Part II is a 1974 film and won at the ceremony in April 1975.

Every sequel nominated for Best Picture

The Bells of St. Mary’s, the first one

Going My Way won Best Picture for 1944 and Bing Crosby won Best Actor as Father O’Malley. A year later Crosby played the same priest in The Bells of St. Mary’s, and both he and the film were nominated again. That made him the first actor nominated twice for the same character. The film won one Oscar, for sound recording, and lost Best Picture to The Lost Weekend.

The Godfather Part II: the first sequel to win

The Godfather Part II won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Francis Ford Coppola. It is still the only time a film and its sequel have both won Best Picture. Coppola had two of the five nominees that year, since The Conversation was also on the list.

Robert De Niro won Best Supporting Actor for playing the young Vito Corleone, the role Marlon Brando had won Best Actor for two years earlier. No other character won two actors an Oscar until the Joker, with Heath Ledger in 2008 and Joaquin Phoenix in 2019.

The Godfather Part III came sixteen years later. It had seven nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won none of them.

The Lord of the Rings: two losses, then eleven wins

All three Lord of the Rings films were nominated for Best Picture. The Fellowship of the Ring lost to A Beautiful Mind and The Two Towers lost to Chicago. The Return of the King was nominated eleven times and won all eleven, which tied the record held by Ben-Hur and Titanic. It is usually read as an award for the trilogy, because the three films were shot together and released a year apart.

It remains the most recent sequel to win Best Picture.

Toy Story 3 and Mad Max: Fury Road

Toy Story 3 is the only animated sequel nominated for Best Picture, and one of three animated films ever nominated, after Beauty and the Beast and Up. It won Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song.

Mad Max: Fury Road came out thirty years after Beyond Thunderdome, with Tom Hardy in the role Mel Gibson had played. It had ten nominations and won six, more than any other film that night, all of them in the craft categories. Best Picture went to Spotlight, which won two.

2022: two sequels in the same year

Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water were the first pair of sequels nominated for Best Picture in the same year. Both had been years in the making: Maverick came 36 years after Top Gun, and The Way of Water 13 years after Avatar. Maverick won one Oscar, for sound, and The Way of Water won one, for visual effects. Everything Everywhere All at Once took seven, including Best Picture.

Dune: Part Two and what Part Three would add

Dune was nominated for Best Picture for 2021 and won six Oscars, for its score and five craft categories, while CODA won the top prize. Dune: Part Two was nominated for 2024 and won two, for sound and visual effects. Denis Villeneuve was not nominated for Best Director for either film.

Part Three adapts Dune Messiah, the second novel. If it is nominated, Dune will be the third series with three films up for Best Picture, after The Godfather and The Lord of the Rings. Most early forecasts and the prediction markets have it behind Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. A win would make it the third sequel to take Best Picture, and the first in 23 years.

What does not count

The Silence of the Lambs, the 1991 winner, comes up in these lists. Thomas Harris wrote the novel as a follow-up to Red Dragon, which had been filmed in 1986 as Manhunter, with Brian Cox as Hannibal Lecter. The 1991 film recast every role and was not made or sold as a continuation, so it is not usually counted as a sequel.

First parts are not sequels either. Wicked was nominated for 2024 and Wicked: For Good, the second half, was not among the ten nominees last March.

The winners and the films they beat, from every ceremony since 1928, are in Best Picture Winners.