Every Film Franchise, Ranked

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – August 9, 2018

Well, maybe not every franchise. But most. We have taken every film franchise for which we have data, calculated an average Metascore for each one, and then ranked the results in the gallery above from worst to best. To be eligible, a franchise must have a minimum of four films with Metascores. That rules out trilogies, obviously.

What else is excluded? A few things:

* Horror film franchises. There are so many of those that we will gather them in their own separate list, which we'll publish later this year. (A few franchises that span multiple genres, like the Alien films, will appear in both lists.)

* Animated films. We are only including live-action movies in this list (mainly to keep the list a somewhat reasonable size—sorry to all you Pokemon and Shrek fans). Note that if a franchise is mostly live-action but has one animated release, the animated film is not included in the average Metascore for that franchise.

* Made-for-TV movies.

* A few franchises where most of the releases were mainly straight to video

* Some very old franchises for which there aren't many reviews still available.

Don't worry: That still leaves over 60 film franchises to rank. Happy browsing!

10 of 64 photo by 20th Century Fox

40.0 #53: Predator

Blending sci-fi, horror, and action, directed by John McTiernan (a year before Die Hard), and starring the unassailable action-movie duo of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers, the first Predator film was ... not all that great, at least at the time. (It is retroactively considered a solid action film, though it may benefit from comparisons to some of the other films in the franchise.) A sequel followed three years later, followed by a pair of dreadful crossover films with the Alien franchise and another Predator sequel in 2010.

Yet another Predator film is coming in September. This one, imaginatively titled The Predator, comes from writer-director Shane Black (Iron Man 3), who co-starred in the original Predator the same year he received his first screenwriting credit (for Lethal Weapon).

The films:
45 Predator (1987)
46 Predator 2 (1990)
29 Alien vs. Predator (2004)
29 Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem (2007)
51 Predators (2010)

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