Once Upon A Time in America should have been a trilogy, it's yet another movie that was undone by its length and the time it was released. Blade Runner is another one that should have probably been spread over two or three movies.
Sometimes I wonder what film history would look like, if only movie directors, producers and distributors had accepted the serial format earlier. It took the success of Return of the Jedi to make it acceptable to spread a story over multiple features, and even then it was considered just a geek thing until Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings saga. Now Marvel keeps scoring hit after hit with the biggest shared-continuity universe in the business, auteurs have embraced serialization with high-quality TV series, and it's only a matter of time before someone starts purposefully making non-genre continuity-linked trilogies.
Sometimes I wonder what film history would look like, if only movie directors, producers and distributors had accepted the serial format earlier. It took the success of Return of the Jedi to make it acceptable to spread a story over multiple features, and even then it was considered just a geek thing until Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings saga. Now Marvel keeps scoring hit after hit with the biggest shared-continuity universe in the business, auteurs have embraced serialization with high-quality TV series, and it's only a matter of time before someone starts purposefully making non-genre continuity-linked trilogies.