The most interesting follow-up films from Best Picture-winning directors

After winning Best Picture with Gone with the Wind, still the highest-grossing movie adjusted for inflation, Victor Fleming went the horror route. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a horror story with critical bona fides. Frederic March had won Best Actor for the 1931 adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel. Fleming’s version, which starred Spencer Tracy, was a hit, though it only got a few technical Oscar nominations and no wins.

Alfred Hitchcock famously never won Best Director, but his movie Rebecca won Best Picture. Foreign Correspondent followed Rebecca quickly. Like, really fast. They came out the same year and were up against each other for Best Picture. Hitchcock’s first film to come out after his win was Suspicion, which won Joan Fontaine a Best Actress award.

Infamously, John Ford and How Green Was My Valley beat Orson Wells and Citizen Kane. After that, though, Ford spent a couple of years making documentaries about World War II at the behest of the U.S. government (check out the book Five Came Back for more on that). When Ford got back to making scripted Hollywood films, he made…a realistic World War II movie.

Elia Kazan’s Best Picture-winning On the Waterfront was huge for Marlon Brando. He followed that up with a movie that broke another iconic actor of the era. East of Eden was the first film to star James Dean and the only one of his movies to come out while he was alive. Kazan was nominated for Best Director, and Dean got a posthumous Best Actor nomination.

If you know movie history, you might say, “Wait, isn’t Lawrence of Arabia the Best Picture winner?” Yes, it won Best Picture. It was also David Lean’s follow-up to Bridge on the River Kwai, another Best Picture winner. Lean made back-to-back Best Picture films. By the way, Lean’s next movie, Doctor Zhivago, was nominated for 10 Oscars and won five, though it lost Best Picture. What a run for Lean.

Comedies rarely win Best Picture, but Billy Wilder pulled it off with The Apartment, though that movie may be more classified as a “dramedy." He followed that up with One, Two, Three, a Germany-set political comedy based on a Hungarian play. It was James Cagney’s last role before effectively retiring (he appeared in Ragtime in 1981). The movie flopped, with some speculating it was hurt by the fact that the Berlin Wall was built after Wilder started filming.

Sure, we could have gone with Francis Ford Coppola’s follow-up to The Godfather — technically, it was The Conversation, though The Godfather Part II came out the same year. The more interesting follow-up is what Coppola did when he won his second Best Picture within two years. He set out to make Apocalypse Now, effectively bankrupted himself, almost killed himself, and then somehow ended up with an iconic war movie.

John G. Avildsen is the least-known name on this list, but he was at the helm of the underdog movie about the underdog boxer, Rocky . Sylvester Stallone went on to superstardom, and Avildsen directed a movie nobody remembers. If you have heard of Slow Dancing in the Big City before, you are in the minority. The film flopped, and Avildsen would float around for several years until he was tapped to direct The Karate Kid.

The most famous “blank check” story in all of filmmaking. Michael Cimino won Best Picture for The Deer Hunter and was given a chance to work on a passion project. He went completely off the deep end, ran late in turning in the film, quadrupled his budget, and gave us the bizarre Heaven’s Gate. The movie is one of the biggest flops, making $3.5 million from a budget of $44 million. Some argue Cimino’s fiasco ended Hollywood's maverick-director era.

James L. Brooks was a TV bigwig when he directed his first film, Terms of Endearment. He got off to an inauspicious start. The film won five Oscars, with Brooks winning Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. It took a few years, but Brooks returned with Broadcast News, far from a sophomore slump. Broadcast News was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture. It didn’t win any of them, but in our opinion should have taken Best Picture over The Last Emperor.

In 1986, Oliver Stone made a typically subtle war film in Platoon. It took home Best Picture. After getting some of his gripes about war out, Stone decided to turn his attention toward greed. Wall Street is a bit less bombastic than Platoon, though where Stone stands is still clear. Michael Douglas won Best Actor for his turn as Gordon Gekko, who delivered an iconic, misquoted, and misinterpreted bit of dialogue.

People rolled their eyes at Kevin Costner. He was going to make his directorial debut with Dances with Wolves. It was jokingly called Kevin’s Gate, which summarizes expectations nicely. Costner delivered a hit that won Best Picture, giving him a chance to do whatever he wanted next. It took seven years, but we got The Postman. This time, skeptics got the disastrous fiasco they anticipated the first time around.

In 1993, Steven Spielberg had arguably the best year a director has ever had (Coppola’s 1974 also comes to mind). He delivered Jurassic Park, a movie-changing blockbuster, but also won Best Picture for Schindler’s List. A few years later, he followed up winning Best Picture with a follow-up to his other 1993 film. The Lost World was a big hit, but the film is largely seen as mediocre.

Say what you will about Forrest Gump, but the film was a massive hit and won Best Picture. Robert Zemeckis had already delivered the Back to the Future trilogy and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He had earned the opportunity to do whatever he damn well pleased as far as Hollywood was concerned. Zemeckis decided to make a serious-minded sci-fi movie based on a novel by Carl Sagan. Speaking to Zemeckis’s power (and Jodie Foster’s star), Contact made $171.1 million worldwide of a budget of $90 million.

In 1995, Mel Gibson was an actor who had started dipping into directing. Braveheart went ahead and won Best Picture. It would be almost a decade until Gibson had another movie come out. The Passion of the Christ is Biblical torture porn. It’s a bizarre film, to say the least, but it made $612.1 million on the back of a Christian audience. It also earned Gibson accusations of anti-Semitism that did not end up feeling unfounded as Gibson’s personal behavior came to overshadow anything he ever did in film.

Titanic became the highest-grossing movie ever and won a record-tying 11 Oscars. James Cameron could do what he wanted. What he wanted to do was explore the deep sea, and technically, he did make two documentaries between Titanic and Avatar. However, Cameron’s follow-up to Titanic in the intended spirit was his long-gestating sci-fi film. Avatar arrived at the perfect moment for a film like that, riding the popularity of 3D to become the new highest-grossing movie ever.

OK, so maybe John Madden is on the John Avildsen level in terms of notability. Do you know the movie he directed? That would be Shakespeare in Love. The narrative on it now is strong-arming and campaigning got it Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan. His follow-up, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, is remembered for being titled Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King was a coronation for Peter Jackson. His massively successful trilogy ended, and the third film won 11 Oscars. Jackson loved the original King Kong and hopped on board a remake that had been in the works for a while. It was a success, though perhaps not to the degree many hoped and expected. After the flop of The Lovely Bones, Jackson returned to the Shire for the Hobbit trilogy.

Finally, Martin Scorsese won Best Picture.  The Departed is not considered his best work by many, but it was a worthy winner nevertheless. He followed it up with Shutter Island, a dark thriller that was more a potboiler than an Oscar candidate. Shutter Island was a hit, though it is not often recalled in the Scorsese canon.

Kathryn Bigelow made history when she won Best Director and Best Picture for The Hurt Locker. She stayed in the realm of war and the Middle East with Zero Dark Thirty. The movie racked up Oscar nominations, but eventually, the film was hit by a backlash. That, plus Detroit flopping, has left Bigelow in the wilderness.

The career of Ben Affleck has been fascinating. He went from promising young actor to Oscar-winning writer to superstar to punching bag to surprisingly good director to Best Picture winner. Affleck was not nominated for Best Director for Argo, but the movie won the big award. Affleck followed that with Live by Night, a flop of a crime movie that has been entirely forgotten. The actor has not directed since but did co-write The Last Duel.

How do you follow up a grim, biographical movie about slavery? If you are Steve McQueen, you direct a flashy thriller. Widows is a heist film but an elevated one. McQueen’s directing plays a part in that. So does the fact Viola Davis stars.

In 2017, fresh off of winning Best Picture for The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro signed on to direct an adaptation of Nightmare Alley. The story plays to del Toro’s strengths, but unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic complicated its release and reception. While the film got four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Nightmare Alley flopped at the box office.

Chloe Zhao won a Best Picture Oscar at the weirdest time to do it. Nomadland won at the 2020 Academy Awards held at the beginning of 2021. You know, the one with the COVID-19 protocols and the night ending with Anthony Hopkins winning Best Actor instead of the Best Picture announcement. Zhao’s win gave Marvel a lot of cache for her directing Eternals. Then Eternals became, to many, the worst movie in the MCU.

It’s weird that Green Book won Best Picture. It’s even stranger that Peter Farrelly directed it. Now, we have a fittingly odd follow-up from Farrelly. The Greatest Beer Run Ever feels very similar to Green Book, which is to say a light drama about a complicated subject based on a true story. Zac Efron plays a guy who goes to Vietnam during the war to deliver beer to his friends. Yes, really.