LOS ANGELES — Francis Ford Coppola said he should have stopped his “Godfather” saga before its award-winning, critically acclaimed sequel, TMZ reported Monday.
Coppola was asked by a TMZ cameraman in Los Angeles if he would ever return to the Corleone crime family he immortalized in 1972’s “The Godfather” and its two sequels.
“There should have only been one,” he replied.
“The Godfather Part II,” released in 1974, won the Academy Award for Best Picture — the first sequel to do so — and is acclaimed as one of the best sequels of all time.
The third “Godfather” film, released in 1990, was received less enthusiastically by critics, many of whom panned the performance by Coppola’s daughter Sofia.
Roger Ebert wrote in his review that it was “not even possible to understand (‘The Godfather Part III’) without knowing the first two.”