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!

12 of 64 photo by Warner Bros.

41.4 #51: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Somehow, the installment featuring Vanilla Ice in his big-screen debut (that would be 1991's The Secret of the Ooze) is far from the worst chapter in the ongoing Ninja Turtle saga, based on the comic book series of the same name. The franchise spans three low-budget, live-action films in the 1990s (with the first one a major hit) plus two more films in a reboot series beginning in 2014. With the most recent release, Out of the Shadows, a major box office disappointment, it is likely that the next film will be yet another reboot.

(Since we are excluding animated films, 2007's TMNT does not figure into our calculation of the series average, though at 41 it actually wouldn't change the overall franchise ranking if it were included.)

The films:
51 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)
45 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991)
40 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993)
31 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)
40 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016)

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