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!

29 of 64 photo by Warner Bros.

53.8 #34: Lethal Weapon

Written by Shane Black and directed by Richard Donner, the original Lethal Weapon is a classic of the buddy-cop genre. The same can be said—perhaps even more so—for the 1989 sequel, which returned Donner and stars Mel Gibson and Danny Glover and was even more of a success with critics and at the box office. All three returned for two additional sequels, and while Lethal Weapon 3, at least, was a huge hit (grossing more than any other film in the franchise), neither of those final two films meet the technical definition of "good." A fifth film has been in development for at least a decade, leading some "fans" to give up waiting and take matters into their own hands.

A 2016 television adaptation was greeted by middling reviews and was forced to make a casting change after season 2 when star Clayne Crawford (in the Mel Gibson role of Riggs) was fired for misbehavior on set. Nevertheless, it persists.

The films:
68 Lethal Weapon (1987)
70 Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)
40 Lethal Weapon 3 (1992)
37 Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)

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