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!

31 of 64 photo by Universal

54.6 #32: Fast and the Furious

The success of the Fast and Furious franchise has been, well, slow and surprising. Originating as a low-budget, street racing-themed crime tale, FF became an actual series with the arrival of the Vin Diesel-less sequel in 2003, followed by a mostly unrelated third film in 2006.

But it wasn't until the fifth film (and second directed by Justin Lin) that the franchise became what it is today, mostly leaving behind its street-racing roots to become a high-powered ensemble action series with big budgets and even bigger box office grosses. Astoundingly, the seventh film in the series grossed over $1.5 billion worldwide, followed by a not-too-shabby $1.2 billion for the eighth installment. Three of the four films in this big-money phase of Fast & Furious also received positive reviews from critics, marking it as the rare series that gets better and more successful with time.

Two more films are planned in the series—with director Lin returning for the first time since FF6—though you'll likely have to wait until 2020 for the next one. But before then you'll get a spinoff called Hobbs and Shaw, centering on the characters played by Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham.

The films:
58 The Fast and the Furious (2001)
38 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
45 The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
46 Fast and Furious (2009)
66 Fast Five (2011)
61 Fast & Furious 6 (2013)
67 Furious 7 (2015)
56 The Fate of the Furious (2017)

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