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May 20, 2023

How To Watch The Unbreakable Trilogy In Order: Where Do Split & Glass Fit?

M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable trilogy is an auteur-driven superhero

M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable trilogy is an auteur-driven superhero franchise, but the arrival of Split and Glass complicated its viewing order.

The Unbreakable trilogy order is complicated by its loosely connected spinoff, Split, and the big franchise crossover, Glass. Unbreakable is considered the first auteur superhero franchise, as all of its movies are written and directed by the same visionary filmmaker: M. Night Shyamalan. The Unbreakable movie trilogy, also known as the Eastrail 177 trilogy, takes influence from superhero comics, but it's much more grounded in reality than the average superhero story. After he presented a real-world version of the superhero myth with Unbreakable, Shyamalan followed it up with a stealth sequel and then an ambitious crossover uniting the first two stories.

Most trilogies have convenient numbering to make their viewing order clear, like Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, and Spider-Man 3, or Back to the Future, Back to the Future Part II, and Back to the Future Part III. Other trilogies make it more difficult for viewers to determine the order to watch the movies, as with the original Matrix trilogy, or A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. With Split and Glass in the mix, the Unbreakable trilogy order is similarly tricky to figure out. Here is the proper viewing order of the Unbreakable trilogy and where Split and Glass fit in.

Related: The Best Matrix Viewing Order (Including All 4 Movies & Shorts)

The Unbreakable trilogy kicks off, appropriately, with Unbreakable, which was released in 2000. Bruce Willis stars in this first installment as David Dunn, a security guard who discovers that he has superhuman strength after emerging from a deadly train crash unscathed. Samuel L. Jackson plays the villainous Elijah Price, a man with brittle bones who owns a comic book store. Going by the nickname "Mr. Glass," he becomes David's arch-nemesis. Unique for its time, Unbreakable offered a refreshingly realistic take on the superhero genre, and audiences responded enthusiastically to the concept, resulting in a worldwide gross of more than $248 million (via Box Office Mojo).

Related: The Best Unbreakable Franchise Characters Ranked

Sixteen years after Unbreakable became one of M. Night Shyamalan's biggest critical and commercial hits, the filmmaker followed it up with Split. One of the first movies to present a standalone supervillain origin story, Split stars James McAvoy as Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man with dissociative identity disorder who develops a personality with supernatural abilities called "The Beast." Anya Taylor-Joy co-stars as Casey Cooke, a teenager kidnapped by one of Kevin's personas to sacrifice to The Beast. The connection to Unbreakable isn't apparent until the ending of Split when Bruce Willis appears in a surprise cameo reprising his role as David Dunn, who recalls a prior supervillain: Mr. Glass.

Related: Split's Alternate Ending Explained

The final chapter of the Unbreakable trilogy and the last one to view in order is Glass, which brings the characters of Unbreakable and Split together with Bruce Willis returning as David, Samuel L. Jackson returning as Elijah, James McAvoy returning as Kevin, and Anya Taylor-Joy returning as Casey. The 2019 movie sees David, Elijah, and Kevin being detained in a psychiatric facility, where the authenticity of their superpowers is debated. Sarah Paulson plays one of the new characters in Glass, a psychiatrist who believes these superhumans suffer from delusions of grandeur. Glass brings the trilogy full circle as a sequel to the individual narratives of both Unbreakable and Split.