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!

14 of 64

46.2 #48 (tie): Benji

There are two major dog movie franchises in cinema history. We actually don't have an average score for Lassie, since most of the movies in that franchise were released in the 1940s (though a fairly recent reboot was very well reviewed). But we do have an average for everyone's second-favorite family dog movie series, and it's not all that good.

Released in 1974, the original, underwhelming Benji was a surprise box office success, eventually leading to four not-so-good sequels (including the bizarre 1980 Chevy Chase vehicle Oh! Heavenly Dog, the only Benji film not to reference Benji in the title). All of those films, like the original, were directed by Joe Camp. The franchise was rebooted earlier this year by Camp's son, Brandon Camp, as a Netflix original film.

The films:
35 Benji (1974)
46 For the Love of Benji (1977)
41 Oh! Heavenly Dog (1980)
53 Benji the Hunted (1987)
49 Benji: Off the Leash! (2004)
53 Benji (2018)

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