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Paramount was so desperate for a “Godfather” sequel they were willing to give Francis Ford Coppola virtually anything — a $1 million directing fee, complete creative control, they even promised that studio chief Robert Evans (Coppola’s nemesis on the first film) wouldn’t read the script. Coppola would have such unprecedented free rein, the studio wouldn’t screen dailies throughout the 104-day shoot (41 more than “Part I”) across three different continents at cost of $13 million (twice the budget of the previous film).
The one demand Paramount pushed back on, but ultimately swallowed, was Coppola’s proposed title: “The Godfather Part II.”
Ironically, 16 years later, Paramount once again rejected Coppola’s proposed title, “The Death of Michael Corleone” — this time, the studio insisted it had to be “The Godfather Part III.”
What changed between the second and third “Godfather” films was how Hollywood came to see sequels, and “The Godfather Part II” was arguably the most important turning point in that evolution. Not only had the film’s endearing success and six Oscars (including Best Picture) opened the marketing floodgates for Hollywood to embrace numerical sequel titles, such as “Rocky II,” and “Jaws 2” — a trend Coppola has, tongue-in-cheek, since apologized for starting— but it changed both Hollywood and its audience’s perception of what a sequel could be.
Hollywood had a long, rich history with sequels and serialization long before “The Godfather Part II,” and at the height of the Golden Age of Hollywood, franchises — especially horror — were just one ingredient in a healthy distribution business. But in the early 1970s, Hollywood was embracing sequels out of desperation in the midst of what was an extremely unhealthy distribution business.
After World War II, 90 million Americans were going to the movies every week on average, a peak that steadily declined before hitting rock bottom in 1971, when it fell below 16 million. Since the ‘60s, Hollywood had been out of step with the changing culture, and lost studio execs were desperate to cash in on any and all hits. Not only would the ’70s see a precipitous rise of in the number of Hollywood sequels, but any film that managed to cut through the zeitgeist gave birth to handfuls of quick, formulaic, often cheaply made, copycats.
In 1972, nothing in recent memory had broken through quite like “The Godfather,” an unexpected box office hit that saved a struggling Paramount, and was credited with parent company Gulf + Western’s stock increasing by over 400-percent that year. It was a genuine juggernaut, with skyrocketing demand driving up the number of showtimes and ticket prices in its first few weeks of release, eventually breaking the all-time record with $81.5 million in theatrical rentals in the US, while doing another $142 million in international rentals.
Studios tried to bite on “The Godfather” success with a string of quickly made mafia movies, like “The Don is Dead” and “Lucky Luciano,” but there was something distinctive about Coppola’s style of epic storytelling — instantly elicited by Nino Rota’s theme music — that went beyond revitalizing the mobster movie genre. At the time, directors, especially A-listers, would never lower themselves to do a cash-grab sequel, but with that year’s best picture-winner also being its biggest ever box office success, Paramount saw Coppola as being needed to pull the puppet strings.
“‘The Godfather Part II’ is really a film that I never particularly wanted to do, or in fact, it didn’t exist in any form for me, just the idea that Paramount was talking about doing a sequel,” explained Coppola on his 2001 DVD commentary track. “The head of Paramount, Charlie Bluhdorn, used to say to me, ‘You’ve got the recipe of Coca-Cola, and you don’t want to make any more bottles?’”
As Bluhdorn’s coke analogy indicates, sequels had all the creative appeal of a greatest hits album. In looking at the history of sequels at this time, Todd Berliner wrote, “The sequel tends to supply excessive amounts of whatever audiences seemed to have liked most about the first movie.” So, for example, the promise to the audience with the “Dirty Harry” sequel “Magnum Force” is it would be three times as violent. Sequels, rightfully, got the critical reputation of something disposable and easy to dismiss.
“The Godfather Part II” would be different. Not only would Coppola be back, it wouldn’t be a quick cash grab, but rather a sizable investment that came with sacrifices for the studio — namely handing control over to a director they knew to be a combative risk-taker, who was aiming to become more an iconoclast than the next Cecile B. DeMille. In between “Godfather” films, Coppola would make “The Conversation,” a personal film that pushed the boundaries of form and content, and would be the type of rewarding experience that represented how Coppola stated he now wanted to work — the polar opposite of the nightmare he experienced making “The Godfather,” in which he was in a constant and multi-front battle to direct his vision of the film.
What Coppola would do with the sequel’s unusual set of circumstances and directorial control, and the endearing respect “Part II” would gain throughout the decade would help rebrand the sequel itself in Hollywood, which has had a profound ripple effect to today’s franchise-obsessed studio execs.
It’s instructive at this point to discuss how Coppola eventually found his way into a sequel, and how two rather simple ingredients — being intrigued by a specific actor and discovering a specific location — supplied the framework that got the director’s creative juices flowing.
One of the first breakthroughs in Coppola finding his way into “Part II” was stumbling upon the Henry Kaiser Estate on Lake Tahoe on a recent trip.
“It’s interesting that Lake Tahoe had a lot to do with finding the key to making this movie,” said Coppola of discovering the Henry Kaiser Estate while travelling. “I thought it was such a incredible estate that what if the Corleones had moved west to get into the gambling casino? It translated the compound that they had in Staten Island in the first movie into a totally new world, and they were beginning to drift from those original New York neighborhoods into this affluent lifestyle in Las Vegas in the west.”
Removed from “The Godfather,” Coppola had been toying with an unique script idea for a story about a father and son, in which the film would cut back and forth between parallel stories of when each was 30 years old. Transposing that idea to his “Godfather” sequel was, through the lens of 1972 Hollywood (and not our prequel crazed modern minds) impractical: Casting someone to play the younger version of Vito Corleone, brought to life by an Oscar winning performance from the legendary Marlon Brando, was considered insane and something the studio would’ve rejected under normal circumstances. But for the iconoclastic Coppola, a desire to work with an up-and-coming actor, who his friends Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese had discovered and was not yet a star, became the other key impetus to make the film.
“I really conceived the idea of being able to do the two stories with Bobby De Niro in mind. I knew him, and I’d go to the restaurant with him, and I’d look at him, and I’d say, ‘He could play that part,” said Coppola. “And so I only went ahead, [it no longer] wasn’t so nuts to make this movie [because] certain things fell in my lap, the Lake Tahoe setting and Bobby De Niro.”
De Niro and the Kaiser Estate were the gateways to the film’s unique structure of simultaneously telling the story of Vito’s ascension and Michael’s descension and the death of the Corleone family his father had built. De Niro could believably play a young Brando in an immigrant story that supplied the warmth and romantic old world charm of the first film and chronicled the rise a don driven by family and a sense of honor, and that story could be juxtaposed against Pacino’s icy Michael losing his family with each of his brilliantly calculated moves to expand the business.
As Coppola indicated, the Tahoe estate supplied a visual correlative to the family home in the first film, but during Michael’s son’s confirmation party at the estate — a direct parallel to Connie’s wedding opening “Part I” at the family’s Staten Island home — we see the family losing its ethnic roots and familial soul in the move west, complete with WASP-y friends and political partners, and the band playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” instead of the traditional “tarantella.”
Explained Coppola, “I would imagine that every scene in ‘Godfather II’ has a precedent in a scene in the first ‘Godfather,’ that, in a funny way, inevitably repeats it and takes it further.”
In the way the Tahoe Confirmation party parallels Connie’s wedding to start the film, at the same point in when a hit on Vito drives “Part I” into a mystery, the attack on Michael’s Tahoe estate forces him to search for answers in New York and Cuba. In major story beats, subtle actions, and even dialogue and violent acts, “Part II” is constantly calling back the first film. “The reasons why I gave it the double structure, the time structure of the past and the present, was to give it another dimension beyond just sort of making the first ‘Godfather’ over again, which is partly what I thought I was doing really,” said Coppola.
Coppola is literally playing the “Part I” greatest hits the audience expects from the sequel, but what emerged from that repetitive structure is a far more tragic tale of how a good man turns evil — as Michael’s soul steadily leaks out with each decision to build the Corleone family business, we watch the story of how his father built the foundations of that empire with honor, and a desire to provide a better life for his family. As with all Coppola films, the film’s allegory is rooted in a deeper sense of the history of power, capitalism, and the American experiment.
But what makes these ideas and themes come to complex life is Coppola’s visuals, and how he reinterprets those repetitions. The structure allowed Coppola to paint those contrasts with masterful strokes, and what we see is a director finding and exploring a new sense of confidence and control. Coppola and cinematographer Gordon Willis butted heads on the first film. Willis had a very rigid sense of the film’s visual grammar and structure, which Coppola eventually came to see as being the correct choice, but at the time the young director was frustrated by his immovable cameraman being yet another obstacle he had to fight. That would change on “Part II.”
“I remember feeling comfortable with the the visualization, the design of the shots, partly because I had this more comfortable relationship with Gordon, but also because I had done ‘The Conversation’ in between, and I was fascinated with the use of a camera that ultimately didn’t move, and actors would walk in and out of the frame, and sometimes you’d be looking at nothing,” said Coppola. “It’s just that the ease between us was much greater and there was room to express ideas. I didn’t feel as I did on the first film up against this crotchety schoolmarm that just said it had to be this way. And I think I felt more free with the second ‘Godfather.’ I was running the production.”
With Paramount forced to invest in Coppola, they enabled him to orchestrate his trademark globetrotting, ambitous production — thrusting the director into a constant state of problem solving, though now of his own making and for him to solve. Coppola himself has favorably compared the experience to “The Conversation” and for laying the roots of how he’d work on “Apocalyse Now” by throwing himself in the deep end of the pool and creatively problem solve his way out. The result was a film he felt was the sequel beign “more well-crafted than the first one,” which he considered “a hateful, horrible experience, in which I was always in the corner for being over budget or something.”
“Godfather Part II” reviews were generally positive, but mixed with a tinge of disappointment. And while the sequel was decidedly a hit, with $48 million domestic and $93 million in international sales, it fell well short of the record setting “Part I.”
Hollywood, though, fully embraced this film, shocking everyone by giving a sequel the Best Picture Oscar, along with Best Director, Screenplay, Art Direction, Score, and Supporting Actor (De Niro). By the end of the 70s, the reputation of “Part II” grew — with critics like Molly Haskell reconsidering and reversing their original negative reviews — and landed at number four on Sight and Sound’s list of Greatest Films of all-time, a top ten position it held with “The Godfather Part I” in 1982, 1992, and 2002. In time, generations of directors and studio execs who came up revering trailblazing path set by 1970s New Hollywood titans like Coppola would come to fundamentally see the sequel in a different light as a result.
There would still cheap, B-movie versions of original hits, with straight-to-video sequels becoming an increasingly viable way to cash in the emerging home video market, but Coppola blazed a different trail for a studio’s biggest hits. Not only did Coppola buck the trend and return for the sequel, what emerged was a belief by some that the best chance for a franchise to actually grow and be enriched was by investing and empowering its creator. The first film’s success wasn’t quickly and cheaply squeezed for another 50 cents on the dollar, it set into motion a 50-year-plus trend of Hollywood relying on, and giving more power and resources to, directors to build on its most valuable properties, which became inseparable from its auteur name above the title.
It’s a trend that parallels the industry’s new reliance on the endearing value of its library in the age of home video. Even a superhero like Batman, would become identified by each iteration’s director through the last four decades: Burton, Nolan, Snyder, Reeves. And even today, when a franchise like “Indiana Jones” or “Jurassic Park” is handed to the next director, the marketing narrative is that Spielberg handpicked and mentored each director’s vision, which often is rooted in trying to honor what he started.
In 2026, it would be unthinkable that anyone but Michael Mann would make “Heat 2,” and yet no one bats an eye that the younger versions of today’s Brandos, Pacino and De Niro, would be played by Christian Bale and Stephen Graham.
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