13 Movies You Didn't Know Were Responsible For Weird Cinematic Milestones

12. The Godfather: Part II Was The First Mainstream Picture To Use "Part II" In Its Title

The first feature length movie ever made, Birth of a Nation, also spawned the first sequel ever made, aptly titled The Fall of the Nation - but it wasn't until the sequel to The Godfather almost 60 years later that the now-common subtitle "Part II" was stuck on the end of a movie to say, hey, this is a follow-up to that other movie you saw!

Before then, movie sequels tended to have unique titles of their own (think Bond) - numbering them wasn't really a thing. Because "Part II" wasn't the mainstream phrase that it is today when Francis Ford Coppola used it to denote the second chapter of his acclaimed trilogy - nowadays, it just seems logical to stick "Part II" onto a sequel, but when Coppola used it, he was legitimately denoting the fact that The Godfather story wasn't actually over, and that we genuinely had only seen half the story.

It was genuinely intended as a clarification and not as a coy marketing tool.