10 Best Opening Credits Sequences In Movie History

The opening few minutes, of any movie, are incredibly important. You only get one shot at a first impression, and for a feature-film, it must be used to invest viewers in its story and give them an indication of what to expect tonally. It's no easy task, but over the years, we've seen many, many fine examples - Raiders Of The Lost Ark's opening boulder-dash and The Dark Knight's bank heist, to name a couple.

Opening credits sequences can have a similar effect, if executed correctly. Of course, nobody really likes watching lines of text scroll by for a few minutes, but sometimes - like in the following ten cases - the credits are made infinitely more intriguing with the addition of dazzling special effects, a rousing score or even nuggets of story information that can improve your enjoyment of the forthcoming movie.

So, where comic-book adaptations have made the end credits of a movie a treat worth anticipating, let's take a look at a bunch of films that started dishing out this goodness right from the very beginning...

Mission: Impossible is that rare franchise that gets better with each installment, by some unfathomable miracle. J.J. Abrams' third entry seemed too good to beat, but Ghost Protocol - and then Rogue Nation - more than delivered the necessary goods. One thing that Rogue Nation couldn't beat, however, was its predecessors exciting, whip-smart opening title sequence, which proved to be a rather memorable moment in a film packed full of them.

After the IMF successfully free star-man Ethan Hunt from the Moscow prison cell he's been rotting in for a good long while, agent Jane Carter is instructed to "light the fuse," setting off a spark that runs through several of the movie's key moments and set pieces - whetting your appetite for what's to come - coupled with a number of seamlessly integrated CGI transition clips.

You can tell that director Brad Bird was at the helm here, with his animation chops - honed on films like Ratatouille and The Iron Giant - being put to good use with that fluid CGI, while the iconic Mission: Impossible theme tune proves to be just as capable at raising your pulse as it was when we watched the first movie back in 1996.