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!

13 of 64 photo by Universal

43.0 #50: The Mummy

The Mummy as a property dates back to 1932, when the great Boris Karloff played the titular character of an Egyptian mummy brought back to life in the present day. That film had multiple sequels, and a British film series followed beginning in 1959.

Filmmaker Stephen Sommers brought the franchise itself back to life with 1999's The Mummy starring Brendan Fraser, and that film kicked off what ultimately became a multi-film franchise (averaged above, listed below) that included three Mummy films as well as a Scorpion King spinoff starring Dwayne Johnson in his first-ever leading role. (That film was followed by three direct-to-video sequels/prequels, minus The Rock, which are not scored and thus not included in the average above.)

Yet another version of The Mummy (also not included in the average score, since it is part of the new and possibly DOA "Dark Universe" franchise) arrived in 2017 and was a box office dud despite the fact that it starred Tom Cruise. (It was also terrible.)

The films:
48 The Mummy (1999)
48 The Mummy Returns (2001)
45 The Scorpion King (2002)
31 The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008)

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