Alex Cox

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After the success of the soundtrack album (notable for featuring many popular LA punk bands), there was enough interest in the film to earn a re-release in a single cinema in New York City, but only after becoming available on video and cable. Nevertheless, it ran for 18 months, and eventually earned $4,000,000.

Continuing his fascination with punk music, Cox's next film was an independent feature shot in London and Los Angeles, following the career and death of bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, initially titled Love Kills and later renamed Sid and Nancy. It was met warmly by critics and fans, though heavily criticised by some, including Pistols' frontman John Lydon, for its inaccuracies. The production of this film also sparked a relationship with Joe Strummer of the Clash, who would continue to collaborate with the director on his next two films.

Cox had long been interested in Nicaragua and the Sandinistas (both Repo Man and Edge City made references to Nicaragua and/or Latin American revolution), and visited in 1984. The following year, he hoped to shoot a concert film there featuring the Clash, the Pogues and Elvis Costello. When he could not get backing, he decided instead to write a film that they would all act in. The film became Straight to Hell. Collaborating with Dick Rude (who also co-starred beside Strummer, Sy Richardson and Courtney Love), he imagined the film as a spoof of the Spaghetti Western genre, filmed in Almería, Spain, where many classic Italian westerns were shot. Straight to Hell was widely panned critically, but successful in Japan and retains a cult following. On 1 June 2012, Cox wrote an article in The New York Times about his long-standing interest in spaghetti westerns.

Continuing his interest in Nicaragua, Cox took on a more overtly political project, with the intention of filming it there. He asked Rudy Wurlitzer to pen the screenplay, which followed the life of William Walker, set against a backdrop of anachronisms that drew parallels between the story and modern American intervention in the area. The $6,000,000 production was backed by Universal, but the completed film was too political and too violent for the studio's tastes, and the film went without promotion. When Walker failed to perform at the box office, it ended the director's involvement with Hollywood studios, and led to a period of several years in which Cox would not direct a single film. Despite this, Cox and some critics maintain that it is his best film.

Shortly after this, Cox was invited to adapt a Jorge Luis Borges story of his choice for the BBC. He chose Death and the Compass. Despite being a British production and an English language film, he convinced his producers to let him shoot in Mexico City. This film, like his previous Mexican production, made extensive use of long-takes. The completed 55-minute film aired on the BBC in 1992.

Cox had hoped to expand this into a feature-length film, but the BBC was uninterested. Japanese investors gave him $100,000 to expand the film in 1993, but the production ran over-budget, allowing no funds for post-production. To secure funds, Cox directed a "work for hire" project called The Winner. The film was edited extensively without Cox's knowledge, and he tried to have his name removed from the credits as a result but was denied, but the money was enough for Cox to fund the completion of Death and the Compass. The finished, 82-minute feature received a limited cinema release in the US, where the TV version had not aired, in 1996.

Damián Alcázar, who had a small role in El Patrullero, went on to collaborate on muiltiple occasions with Mexican director Luis Estrada, in two of whose films, Herod's Law (1999) and A Wonderful World (2006), Cox appears. However, in A Wonderful World, Cox's role is reduced to a cameo at the end of the film.

In 1997, Alex Cox made a deal with Dutch producer Wim Kayzer to produce another dual TV/feature production, Three Businessmen. Initially, Cox had hoped to shoot in Mexico but later decided to set his story in Liverpool, Rotterdam, Tokyo and Almería. The story follows businessmen in Liverpool who leave their hotel in search of food and slowly drift further from their starting point, all the while believing they are still in Liverpool. The film was completed for a small budget of $250,000. Following this, Cox moved back to Liverpool and became interested in creating films there.

Cox had long been interested in the Jacobean play, The Revenger's Tragedy, and upon moving back to Britain, decided to pursue adapting it to a film. Collaborating with fellow Liverpudlian screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, the story was recast in the near future, following an unseen war. This adaptation, titled Revengers Tragedy, consisted primarily of the original play's dialogue, with some additional bits written in a more modern tone. The film is also notable for its soundtrack, composed by Chumbawamba.

Following this, Cox directed a short film set in Liverpool for the BBC titled I'm a Juvenile Delinquent – Jail Me! (2004). The 30-minute film satirised reality television as well as the high volume of petty crime in Liverpool which, according to Cox, is largely recreational.

Searchers 2.0, named after but based on The Searchers, became Cox's first film for which he has sole writing credit since Repo Man, and marked his return to the comedy genre. A road movie and a revenge story, it tells of two actors, loosely based on and played by Del Zamora and Ed Pansullo, who travel from Los Angeles to a desert film screening in Monument Valley in the hopes of avenging abuse inflicted on them by a cruel screenwriter, Fritz Frobisher (Sy Richardson). It was scored by longtime collaborator Dan Wool aka Pray for Rain ( Sid & Nancy, Straight to Hell, Death & the Compass, The Winner, Three Businessmen, Repo Chick among others). Although the film was unable to achieve a cinema release in America or Europe, Cox claimed the experience of making a film with a smaller crew and less restrictions was energising. It is available on DVD in Japan, and was released in October 2010 in North America.

Alex Cox had attempted to get a Repo Man sequel, titled Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday, produced in the mid-'90s, but the project fell apart, with the script adapted into a graphic novel of the same name. First Look: Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday , Entertainment Weekly For his next micro-feature, he wrote a fresh attempt at a Repo follow-up, although it contained no recurring characters, so as to preserve Universal's rights to the original. Repo Chick was filmed entirely against a green screen, with backgrounds of digital composites, live action shots, and miniatures matted in afterwards, to produce an artificial look. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival on 9 September 2009.

, Cox was teaching film production and screenwriting at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

In 2013 Cox directed Bill, the Galactic Hero, developed from a science fiction book by Harry Harrison. It was funded by a successful Kickstarter funding campaign, raising $114,957 of the original $100,000 goal. The film was to be made, created and acted by his film students in monochrome with supervision from professional film makers who would be giving their time on the film for free.

Cox's 2013 book The President and the Provocateur examines events in the lives of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald leading up to Kennedy's assassination, with reference to the various conspiracy theories.

In 2017 Cox directed another crowdfunded film, Tombstone Rashomon, which tells the tale of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral from multiple perspectives in the style of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon.

In September 2019, Cox started the podcast Conversations with Cox and Kjølseth with his friend and colleague Pablo Kjølseth. In October 2022, Cox announced the end of the podcast, citing its small audience and the comparative success of podcasts by Joe Dante, Quentin Tarantino and Cox's one-time collaborator Roger Deakins.

In June 2024 Cox began crowdfunding a film adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls, which he says will be his last film.

Cox is a fan of the Japanese Godzilla films and appeared in a 1998 BBC documentary highlighting the series. He also narrated the documentary Bringing Godzilla Down to Size and wrote the Godzilla in Time comics for Dark Horse. He tried to direct an American Godzilla film at one point, but unsuccessfully submitted his outline to TriStar Pictures.