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!

23 of 64

49.6 #40: The Karate Kid

The martial arts competition franchise has been waxing on and off since the mid-1980s, when Rocky director John G. Avildsen helmed the first, iconic Karate Kid film. Avildsen would return with two sequels again featuring stars Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita, while a reboot in 1994 from director Christopher Cain centered on a young fighter played by Hilary Swank.

Yet none of those films received generally positive reviews from critics—not even the beloved original. Surprisingly, the best-reviewed film in the franchise (albeit by an exceedingly small margin) is the Will Smith-produced 2010 reboot from Agent Cody Banks director Harald Zwart that starred Jaden Smith as the young fighter and Jackie Chan as his instructor. (Of course, the martial art featured in that film was kung fu and not karate, by why change the title?)

The franchise has since moved to the small screen in the form of the better than expected YouTube original series Cobra Kai, which was recently renewed for a second season.

The films:
60 The Karate Kid (1984)
55 The Karate Kid Part II (1986)
36 The Karate Kid Part III (1989)
36 The Next Karate Kid (1994)
61 The Karate Kid (2010)

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