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!

22 of 64

48.7 #41: Cheech & Chong

The kings of stoner comedy—the comedy duo of Tommy Chong and Richard "Cheech" Marin—turned their increasing fame on the stand-up circuit in the '70s into a string of feature films—united by the duo's starring presence—beginning with the 1978 cult classic Up in Smoke. But only their next movie (the aptly titled Next Movie) scored positive reviews from critics. That film, and many of its lesser follow-ups, was directed by Chong.

The duo stopped making their own films in the mid-1980s, though they returned in 2013 with an animated feature (not included in the average score) called Cheech & Chong's Animated Movie!.

The films:
57 Up in Smoke (1978)
66 Cheech and Chong's Next Movie (1980)
54 Nice Dreams (1981)
40 Things Are Tough All Over (1982)
40 Still Smokin (1983)
35 Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers (1984)

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