7 Movie Spinoffs That Were Better Than The Original

4. Creed

Creed Rocky
Warner Bros. Pictures

The Rocky series cemented itself as an important part of cinematic history largely off the back of the high quality of the first film. The sequel is good, the third is okay, and the fourth and fifth are just bad.

Rocky Balboa managed to get things back on track a little, but it still felt like more of the same, making it glaringly obvious that the franchise needed to reinvent itself and head in a fresh direction. And in 2015, up stepped Creed.

The best entry in the series since the 1976 original, nobody truly expected the movie to be as good as it was, but thanks to a pair of stellar performances by Michael B. Jordan and the Oscar-nominated Sylvester Stallone, a punchy, modern energy imbued by director Ryan Coogler, and - crucially - by doing something different with the Rocky character, Creed was exactly what the series needed: a movie that captured the spirit of the original, but still tried to boldly forge its own path.

Creed is up there with Batman Begins and Casino Royale in terms of making a tired franchise feel exciting again, and it did all of this while somehow managing to feel like the natural continuation of Rocky's story. Well played, Mr. Coogler. Well played.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!