5 Best Movie Sequels To TV Shows, Ranked

Sometimes, television-based stories just get too big for the small screen. They need to break free and find a larger landscape to play in — and a bigger budget to do so — which is why some television shows have been brave enough to make their way into theaters. With an extra bit of visual polish and a longer runtime than usual to play with, certain shows have blessed fans with a feature-length outing that has delivered on everything they’d hoped for. More importantly, they’ve hit highs that surpass even the show they’re jumping off from.

With that in mind, we’ve put together a highly entertaining batch of movies that broke off from massively popular shows or canceled cult classics that deserved a second chance. From science fiction stories getting a blockbuster bump to side-splitting comedies that might even come with a song or two, this finalized list of brilliant films is full of great entries to add to the watchlist. To kick things off, we’ve got a movie on the list that kept a legacy of a loopy law enforcer going longer than the show ever could, with action, drama, and good, clean love — without utensils.

In 1988, Leslie Nielsen revived a character that had seemingly been shelved after appearing in only six episodes of television. “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad” expanded on the short-lived series “Police Squad!” from 1982, calling dimwitted detective Lt. Frank Drebin back into action to crack open a brand new case with a much bigger budget. The result was one of the funniest films ever made, according to science (right after “Airplane!”).

Tapping into the same slapstick and whip-smart gags of the short-lived show it was fueled by, “The Naked Gun” brought Nielsen back to the big screen after “Airplane!” and the result was just as hilarious. Playing things stupendously straight in the fashion that had made Nielsen one of the finest of funnymen, Drebin’s big-screen break saw him on a mission to stop a huge drug operation, as well as halt an assassination attempt on Queen Elizabeth II. From here, it’s beaver jokes, questionable bribery offers for information, and hypnosis being used as a plot device in an era where it was far more common than it is now.

While it might have aged in some places, there were enough laughs to warrant two more sequels and an immensely under-appreciated reboot that saw Liam Neeson reopen the files of “Police Squad!” With that in mind, even if you don’t see the original, just be glad that it gave us the guy from “Taken” thwarting a bank heist dressed as a Girl Scout.

Before it hit theaters, the common expectation was that another forgotten television show was getting big-screen treatment with “21 Jump Street.” After the likes of “Starsky and Hutch” and “The Dukes of Hazzard” had recently hit theaters, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the madcap minds behind “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs” (and eventually Ryan Gosling’s “Project Hail Mary”) were going to do the same here. Of course, while Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill’s school-based buddy cop movie was a hit in its own right, one of the highlights of “21 Jump Street” was that it was a stealth sequel to the original series, with founding members of the Jump Street crew helping the new case.

The result leads to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance from Holly Robinson Peete as Judy Hoffs, before Johnny Depp and Peter DeLuise (as Tom Hanson and Doug Penhall) blow their cover as undercover FBI agents and former Jump Street members. Their exit is as swift as their entrance, but it makes for an ingenious way to link to what came before and turn a reboot into a sequel that still holds up, along with its own follow-up film, “22 Jump Street.” Now if only we got the fifteen squillion sequels we were promised in the second movie’s credits, all would be right with the world.

An impressive feat for a film spawned from a television show is to make sure that even newcomers are as invested as die-hard fans. That, however, is an even tougher mission when said show was canceled after a single season. Nevertheless, in 2005, the creator of “Firefly,” Joss Whedon, managed to put together a feature film that carried on the story of Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and his crew, along with the secret and super living weapon he was carrying that came in the form of River Tam (Summer Glau).

It perhaps benefited “Serenity” that “Firefly” burnt out after one season, ensuring that little background was needed for the uninitiated. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop Fillion and company from making the characters they thought they’d lost feel lived in, so much so that some of the shocking deaths that occur hit hard, no matter what point of the ‘verse you’ve entered. Throw in a bigger budget and some extra star power from Chiwetel Ejiofor as the sword-swinging Operative, and “Serenity” is a decent dose of the “Firefly” world to leave you considering exploring it further. Thankfully, we’ll be able to do just that now that Fillion and the cast have announced an animated series is in active development set between the events of “Firefly” and “Serenity” (via Deadline), thereby even bringing dead characters back to this world and proving that you really can’t stop the signal, after all.

It took 18 seasons for “The Simpsons” to bite the cinematic bullet and deliver a movie to fans. Matt Stone and Trey Parker gave the world a “South Park” movie after two seasons, and it still stands as a highlight in the mountain town’s history. “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” like many filmic outings of beloved animated shows, offers a more polished look than the source material, but the writing of the 1999 movie is also much sharper, channeled through the award-winning songs that run throughout.

There’s, of course, a nonsensical story at play, as the boys’ desperation to see the Terrence and Philip movie, “Asses of Fire,” somehow sparks a war between the United States and Canada, all while Kenny, after being killed by a doctor that sounds like George Clooney, is present for a struggling relationship between Satan and Saddam Hussein. Somewhere among this paper cut-out bred chaos are musical hits like “Uncle F***a,” “Blame Canada,” and “What Would Brian Boitano Do?” That’s what makes this a standout watch that’s still just as funny as it was back in 1999. It’s Parker and Stone’s minds let loose in a way that, up until then, hadn’t been before — and after 28 seasons and six more movies that appeared on television, proved this wasn’t one bombastic fart of a film, after all.

Technically, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” continued the story of the starship Enterprise and its crew from the original “Star Trek” series. However, just like Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) himself, we don’t believe in no-win scenarios, which is why the sequel to the sequel of the original series, “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” takes the top spot on this list. 

Like any film in this collection, the 1982 movie is a reward for fans of the show it follows, offering a bunch of golden nuggets for “Trek” lovers, with the biggest highlight being Ricardo Montalbán’s return as Khan Noonien Singh. From the show’s 22nd episode, “Space Seed,” comes a forgotten ghost from Kirk’s past that ranks among the greatest movie villains of all time. Fueled by vengeance and relishing Kirk’s downfall, Montalbán’s Khan is magnetic, and alongside Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, elevates the “Star Trek” universe to a cinematic scale it would revisit in the years to come.

Giving Kirk and crew another big-screen outing ratcheted up the risk and the kill count to levels “Star Trek” hadn’t reached before. Doing so culminated in one of the most heartbreaking moments in the franchise, and perhaps all of sci-fi movie history, with the death of Spock (which Leonard Nimoy nearly deprived us of). By doing so, it established a standard to which all later “Star Trek” movies would try to hold themselves. No matter how much they tried, few would be able to conjure this much wrath in one film.