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!

32 of 64 photo by Universal

55.8 #31: Jurassic Park

Steven Spielberg's hit 1993 adaptation of Michael Crichton's sci-fi novel remains the only critic-approved film in the nearly $5 billion-grossing franchise even though Spielberg himself returned for the first of two direct sequels.

Joe Johnston's Jurassic Park III was the worst of the bunch and (perhaps not coincidentally) the only film in the series to underwhelm at the box office, killing the franchise until it was revived for a new trilogy in 2015 (which will conclude with 2021's Jurassic World 3).

The films:
68 Jurassic Park (1993)
59 The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
42 Jurassic Park III (2001)
59 Jurassic World (2015)
51 Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

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