Trilogy - Unofficial or Mistaken Trilogies

Unofficial or Mistaken Trilogies

Sometimes a trio of works is known as a trilogy because of its creator. For example, before Quentin Tarantino's fourth film was released, his films Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown were sometimes referred to as "the Quentin Tarantino trilogy", although the stories of the three films hardly interconnected.

Three works with similar themes from a creator may later come to be known as a trilogy, especially if produced one after the other. The Steven Spielberg films A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, and Catch Me If You Can are unofficially known as "the running man trilogy", because each featured a main character escaping a pursuer. Terry Gilliam has dubbed his films Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as "The Imagination Trilogy", in that each movie has to do with the imagination of humans in the three stages of life: child, man, older man. Another example is the Dollars Trilogy by Sergio Leone; no continuity between the three movies was intended by Leone, but American marketers advertised the Clint Eastwood character in each film as being the same "Man with No Name".

One of the most popular "trilogies" of fantasy books, The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, is not a trilogy, though it is often referred to as such. Tolkien regarded it as a single work and divided it into a prologue, six books, and five appendices. Because of post-World War II paper shortages, it was originally published in three volumes. It is still most commonly sold as three volumes, but has also been published in one-volume and seven-volume editions (six books and the appendices).

Occasionally, more than three works are planned but never finished. The Gormenghast fantasy trilogy is a trilogy by default, as author Mervyn Peake planned to write more novels set in that fictional world until his health failed.

In contrast, some works that were originally intended to be trilogies have been reclassified due to subsequent additions. George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series was originally planned as a trilogy, but has already expanded to five published novels with another two planned. Christopher Paolini changed the name of his "The Inheritance Trilogy" to The Inheritance Cycle, having announced that he would be writing a fourth book.

In some cases, a work is retroactively named a trilogy instead of having been designed as such by the authors, particularly if it is a story arc of a continuously running series such a comic book or television show. This might be due to a vaguely recurring or coincidental theme in each installment. One example is issues 48, 49, and 50 of the original Fantastic Four comic book which are notable for introducing the characters of Galactus and Silver Surfer. These are now commonly known as the Galactus Trilogy although the term wasn't used in the original issues.

In the modern era of home video, story arcs from a long-running television series might be packaged as a trilogy boxset even if they weren't presented as such in the original broadcast. The so-called E-Space Trilogy of Doctor Who includes the stories Full Circle, State of Decay, and Warriors Gate. Other than being consecutive stories set in E-Space, the three stories are self-contained.