The Longest Awaited Sequels Of All-Time

28 years of dreaming, hoping, waiting… all come down to tonight at midnight. 28 years from first entering The Grid in 1982’s TRON to diving back in tonight in TRON: Legacy. Is it really happening!? It still seems surreal this film exists. When you wait this long for something, it feels like it should almost never really arrive.

Similar feelings occurred before sitting down to watch Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and, before that Episode III (although only three years since the last Prequel, it was the end of, really, sequences we heard about and were dreaming about since around 1980).

So what other films took decades before giving audiences another dose of their worlds?

May we present the All-Time Longest Awaited Sequels.  Not necessarily the MOST awaited, just the sequels with the longest length of time between them in theaters. Those were the only two rules, nothing straight-to-video (like Disney’s countless animated sequels) and no reboots – gotta be a proper sequel! So, let’s take a look, starting with anything that added up to a 10 year or longer wait…

10 YEARS
X-files 1 to 2

11 YEARS
Rocky 5 to 6
Toy Story 2 to 3

12 YEARS
Terminator 2 to 3
Die Hard 3 to 4
Clerks to Clerks 2

16 YEARS
2001 to 2010
Chinatown to Two Jakes
Godfather 2 to 3
American Werewolf In London to Paris
Jedi to Phantom Menace

18 YEARS
Blue Brothers 1 to 2

19 YEARS
Indy 3 to 4

20 YEARS
Predator 2 to Predators (does not include the “Aliens Vs” films)
Rambo 3 to 4

25 YEARS
The Hustler to Color of Money

28 YEARS
Tron to Tron: Legacy

….and honorable mention going to:

Fantasia (1940) to Fantasia/2000 (1999)
(since it is not a TRUE sequel, just another installment.)

Did I leave any out? Comment away and let me know what I missed!

And most of all, enjoy the longest-awaited sequel of all time tonight at midnight!