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!

3 of 64 photo by Paramount Pictures

30.3 #60: Death Wish

Though it didn't receive positive reviews at the time, the violent 1974 vigilante thriller Death Wish (adapted from Brian Garfield's novel) became an influential classic of the genre, and was perhaps the film most associated with its star, Charles Bronson (who was already in his 50s at the time of filming and had already been featured in prominent roles in classics such as The Dirty Dozen and Once Upon a Time in the West).

The surprise success of the first film led to a belated (and far inferior) sequel in 1982, which remains the worst film in the franchise. Three more (only slightly less bad) sequels followed, and a recent remake (starring Bruce Willis in the role originated by Bronson) also failed to win over critics.

The films:
51 Death Wish (1974)
11 Death Wish II (1982)
18 Death Wish III (1985)
46 Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987)
25 Death Wish V: The Face of Death (1994)
31 Death Wish (2018)

Where To Buy