Quite often a thriller will be a self-contained single story. However, often they're based on book series in which the characters have other adventures. Or the films spend so much time on world-building, it's a real shame that audiences never get to revisit there again.
This list will look at ten great thriller films that, unfortunately, seem unlikely to ever return to the big screen. While some of them have spawned TV shows or have sequel books, this is a wishlist for cinematic sequels only.
10 The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Based on the novels by Patricia Highsmith, this crime thriller with an all-star cast (including Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jude Law) was a huge hit at the time of release. Stylishly directed by academy award winner Anthony Minghella, it was an enjoyable throwback to the noir era of cinema.
However, despite the film's success, these versions of the characters never took to the screen again. There are numerous other Ripley books and many other film adaptations to choose from, but this remains a special, and unique, version.
9 Fargo (1996)
Fargo may be one of the most perfect self-contained thrillers ever made, but the success of its TV show spin-off proves that a sequel could have worked. Two thugs botch a kidnapping and eventually get tracked down by the good-natured and heavily pregnant chief of the Fargo police.
Coincidence and freak accidents are the main motivators for the action and are the main appeal to the film. Fargo has a storytelling style that can easily be replicated with different plots, just as the TV show has done. Whether the Fargo sequel saw Marge solving another mystery or jumped back in time, there is definitely more to explore in this world.
8 Fight Club (1999)
Another David Fincher classic and another excellent self-contained thriller. Edward Norton plays an insomniac who, upon meeting the mysterious Tyler Durden, begins a fight club to find some purpose in his life. A film sequel has never really been on the cards, which should come as no surprise considering Fight Club's ending.
However, Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the original novel of Fight Club, has also penned a comic book sequel, Fight Club 2. The book was well-received, however, the film has now grown so successful on its own, it's unlikely another outing will ever be made.
7 David Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
At one point, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was one of the most talked-about series in the world. The books were phenomenally successful and had been made into a relatively well-received cinematic trilogy in their native Sweeden.
However, when David Fincher made his English language version, it was like he had breathed new life into the story. Fincher, known for his dark thrillers, added a real nasty edge to his version which, arguably, made it more enjoyable than the original. There were talks of completing the series, but unfortunately, Fincher never returned to the franchise.
While a loosely connected sequel was released in 2018, The Girl in the Spider's Web was closer to a franchise reboot than a proper continuation and had a completely different tone to Fincher's thriller.
6 Ex Machina (2014)
Alex Garland had already made a name for himself as a writer of original and successful sci-fi films before he made his directorial debut with the excellent Ex Machina. A worker at a huge tech firm wins the chance to perform a Turing test on his boss' new AI, Ava.
The film is a really tense claustrophobic thriller that asks some deep philosophical questions about humanity and consciousness, none of which get fully answered. While it's another film that works on its own, the ending is relatively open-ended and it has a very isolated setting; there is definitely more in this world to see.
5 Searching (2018)
Despite being a hit with critics and commercially, details on Searching's potential sequel have been surprisingly scarce. John Cho plays David, a father who wakes up one day to find his daughter missing. The entire film is built from screen captures, meaning characters talk to each other via facetime and clues are found by trawling through social media posts.
Searching is undoubtedly one of the most successful films to pull off this style of storytelling. At times it's incredibly tense, genuinely mysterious and absolutely heartbreaking. The writing and the direction alone make this film well worthy of a sequel.
4 Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Quentin Tarantino is not known for his sequels, he's often said that the two Kill Bill films should be taken as one movie. However, he has been known to promise the idea of making a sequel. He has mentioned that he'd make more films with Rick Dalton from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and he even recut The Hateful Eight into a longer, four-part TV series, with promises of more.
When he released Inglourious Basterds, one of Tarantino's best that follows a group of Nazi Hunters in WWII, he also teased further war movies featuring ancestors or descendants of Brad Pitt's character, with Pitt returning to play each of them. It's now been long enough that this will probably never happen, but it would have been great to see just one more.
3 Hanna (2011)
Saoirse Ronan has had a few attempts at landing a franchise role. Along with 2013's The Host, she also made 2011's Hanna, a thriller about a young girl with Black Widow-esque assassin training who gets caught up in an international conspiracy. The film didn't hit very big when upon release, which is probably the main reason for the lack of a sequel.
Hanna's world and story, however, could have been expanded upon (and indeed were in the form of a TV spin-off) but given where Ronan's career has now gone, it is unlikely that she will return to this role.
2 Three Kings (1999)
Three Kings is one of the great multi-hyphen thrillers. It's a comedy, an action film, a war movie, and also a heist flick. As a group of US Marines prepares to leave the Middle-East, word gets to them of a huge cache of gold being held not that far away.
They decide to liberate it and get into a number of shoot outs along the way. Despite it being a hugely entertaining film that still holds up, it's unlikely that there will be a follow up made, mainly because star George Clooney and director David O. Russell argued so badly they very nearly came to blows on set.
1 Good Time (2017)
The Safdie brothers were relatively low key filmmakers when Robert Pattinson got in touch asking to work with them. A call they never expected to get, they quickly set aside other projects and pulled a script together. The result was Good Time.
Connie (Pattinson) and his brother's attempt to rob a bank goes terribly wrong. With his brother in jail, Connie has to work to both break him out and score more money. A very tense and excellently well-made thriller, it would be great to find out what happened to Connie after the events of Good Time. The Safdie brothers are interested in only making films that they wanted to, and given that Uncut Gems was brilliant, a Good Time sequel is probably not a priority.
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