10 Surprisingly Good Movie Sequels NOBODY Saw Coming

While few were expecting the decades-in-the-making Top Gun sequel to be genuinely bad, was anyone primed for much more than a basic assembly legacy sequel with some awesome aerial dogfights?

If you told most folk in early 2022 that Top Gun: Maverick would both become the second-highest-grossing film of that year behind only Avatar: The Way of Water and receive six Oscar nominations including Best Picture, they would've laughed in your face - and rightly so.

But between Joseph Kosinski's stunning technical filmmaking, a surprisingly witty, character-driven script, and the efforts of an outstanding Tom Cruise-led cast, Maverick decisively blew the original movie out of the water and confirmed itself to be one of the greatest legacy sequels - and arguably sequels period - ever made.

And so, it's easy to see why Paramount delayed Maverick almost two years from its intended June 2020 release date - to get some distance from the worst period of the pandemic and ensure that as many audiences as possible could view it on the big screen.