The team behind Oscar-nominated crime thriller Hell and High Water have just announced a new project, but what can they learn from other re-teams that have and haven’t been successful?

It’s human nature to want to recapture the magic of a particular moment in time. It’s why rock bands have reunion tours, why television shows get rebooted, and why couples who break up often find themselves inclined to give it another shot. It happens at the movies, too. We know that sequels and franchises are de rigeur these days, but they’re not quite trying to recapture magic. They only want to make your money disappear.

Why we should learn to stop worrying and love the blockbuster franchise Read more

On the other hand, when the director and stars of last year’s surprise hit western Hell or High Water announce they are re-teaming for another, completely different film, it smacks of genuine collaboration. Like many film artists before them, director David Mackenzie and stars Chris Pine and Ben Foster seem to have found a team that plays well together. Will that translate to another hit? History gives them about a 50-50 chance.

Sometimes it works

American Hustle

Facebook Twitter Pinterest American Hustle: the highest grossing film of David O Russell’s career.

Writer/director David O Russell’s 2012 romcom was the biggest success of his career. Featuring up-and-comers Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook grossed $236m worldwide and was nominated for eight Academy awards. Before the Oscar telecast had ended, Russell was already working with key players from Playbook – Cooper, Lawrence, and Robert De Niro – on American Hustle. Without stopping for small details like a completed script, Russell embraced improvisation and ended up making the best and highest-grossing film of his career. The trio also followed him to his next film, 2015’s disappointing Joy, showing how easy it is to push a good thing too far.

Raging Bull

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/UNITED ARTISTS

Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are typically remembered as great collaborations between Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. But screenwriter Paul Schrader was in some ways the driving force behind both films. During a dark period in his life, Schrader wrote Taxi Driver on spec in just 10 days, keeping a loaded gun on his desk as “inspiration”. The results were groundbreaking. Four years later, De Niro and Scorsese were ready to make Raging Bull, based on a memoir by boxer Jake LaMotta, but they didn’t like the script by Mardik Martin. They turned to their old friend Schrader, who did a comprehensive rewrite, and put one of the best films of the 1980s – and arguably the high point of both Scorsese’s and De Niro’s careers – into production.

Magnolia

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Magnolia: a sprawling mosaic of love and loss in the San Fernando Valley. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/New Line

When Paul Thomas Anderson made his second film Boogie Nights in 1997, he ignited the careers of some of our era’s finest actors. John C Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Don Cheadle, and Luis Guzman first entered our consciousness in Anderson’s porn industry epic, while established stars like Burt Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg and Julianne Moore showed new sides to their talent. Anderson took a handful of these actors – Reilly, Hoffman, and Moore – to his next film, Magnolia, a similarly-sprawling mosaic of love and loss in the San Fernando Valley. The film is more ambitious – adding elements of magical realism to his cinema of emotional verité – and having a trusted group of actors on board was surely a help to the young director.

The Sting

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Newman and Robert Redford: one of cinema’s great duos.

When stars Robert Redford and Paul Newman collaborated in 1969 on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, it was a collision of American heartthrobs. Turns out the two most handsome men on the planet also had an irrepressible comic chemistry, shepherded to the screen by veteran director George Roy Hill. Butch Cassidy scored big at the box office and earned a slew of Oscar nominations, so the trio teamed up four years later for The Sting, which finally put them over the edge. The delightful con-artist comedy won best picture, director, and original screenplay, and cemented Redford and Newman as one of cinema’s great on-screen duos with only two films.

Chasing Amy

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ben Affleck as the magificent doofus alongside Joey Lauren Adams. Photograph: Allstar/Miramax

Chasing Amy may be the only film on this list that is inarguably better than the film that inspired it. After the critical and commercial death of Mallrats, Kevin Smith worked quickly to purge himself of its stink. He grabbed his favorite actors from that film – Ben Affleck, Jason Lee and Joey Lauren Adams – and crafted a low-budget romantic drama based partially on the director’s off-camera relationship with Adams. In his first lead role, Affleck plays a magnificent doofus, and a problematic story about a Catholic guy who wants to date a lesbian shifts gradually into perhaps the most honest film made about love in the 1990s.

Sometimes it doesn’t

Fierce Creatures

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fierce Creatures stands on its own as a decent comedy.

How do you follow one the greatest comedies of all time? The best-case scenario is that you make a relatively funny movie that can’t possibly live up to the first. I’m not sure what inspired John Cleese, Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Palin to reunite for Fierce Creatures after the enormous success of A Fish Called Wanda. Maybe they had so much fun they wanted to work together again. Maybe they felt bad about all the animals they faux-killed in Wanda and decided to atone by making something more animal-friendly (Creatures centers on efforts to save a zoo). The film stands on its own as a decent comedy and is worth watching for Kevin Kline’s hilariously deranged double performance. But compared to Wanda, it’s a cold fish.

A Life Less Ordinary

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Life Less Ordinary wasn’t a total failure, but it wasn’t Trainspotting. Photograph: Moviestore Collection

Technically, director Danny Boyle, writer John Hodge and actor Ewan McGregor first collaborated on 1994’s Shallow Grave, but it was 1996’s Trainspotting that inspired college boys everywhere to put their poster on their wall. Trainspotting was a massive hit that launched several careers, but the trio’s follow-up, 1997’s A Life Less Ordinary, failed to meet expectations. It’s not a total failure of a movie – at the very least, it’s the only film in which a pair of angels played by Delroy Lindo and Holly Hunter make a man dig his own grave – but it was a commercial failure, and the shine was definitely off. Boyle and Hodge wouldn’t collaborate again until 2013’s Trance, which turned out to be the biggest failure of all their careers.

Runaway Bride

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julia Roberts and Richard Gere haven’t appeared together since Runaway Bride. Photograph: Allstar/Touchstone Pictures

Technically, Runaway Bride isn’t a sequel to Pretty Woman, but it seeks to capture the romantic thrills of the original by pairing director Garry Marshall with stars Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. The romcom pulled in a decent haul ($309m worldwide), but has aged poorly. The notion of a woman who is famous for backing out of her weddings meeting a sexy journalist who saves her from her fears of commitment isn’t just bizarre; it feels achingly regressive by today’s modern standards of feminism, and Gere and Roberts haven’t appeared in a film together since.

The Order

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Order has just an 8% review on Rotten Tomatoes.

A Knight’s Tale was a terribly bizarre mash-up, a medieval joust comedy loaded with contemporary pop songs. The Order, which re-united director Brian Helgeland with stars Heath Ledger and Shannyn Sossamon, is just terrible. One of the worst reviewed studio movies of this century (8% on Rotten Tomatoes), The Order is an overly solemn religious thriller about a priest fighting a supernatural being called a “sin-eater.” Heard enough? It aims for The Exorcist and ends up closer to The Exorcist III. The best that can be said about it is that it didn’t totally derail the career of Ledger. Sossamon, however, retreated to television work, and it was a decade before Helgeland, an accomplished screenwriter, was allowed to direct again.

Most Adam Sandler movies since Happy Gilmore

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Adam Sandler loves to keep his friends employed.

Adam Sandler’s career seems to be an extended exercise in getting the band back together. In Happy Gilmore, he paired himself with director Dennis Dugan and writer Tim Herlihy. Dugan would go on to direct eight more Sandler flicks, while Herlihy would write seven. It was also one of the first films for actor Allan Covert (he played the homeless guy who becomes Happy’s caddy), who would populate his entire subsequent career almost exclusively with Sandler films. Keeping his friends employed and suckering studios into paying for his vacations to Africa (Blended) and Hawaii (Just Go With It), sounds like a charmed life. It’s not as charmed for the viewers.