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!

36 of 64 photo by 20th Century Fox

58.4 #27: Die Hard

Whether or not it's a Christmas movie is irrelevant; the original John McTiernan-directed Die Hard is a stone-cold action movie classic, making a major movie star (for a while, at least) out of TV's Bruce Willis, then best known for Moonlighting.

Willis returned for four slightly lesser (though financially successful) follow-ups. Critics think films 2 and 4 are the better of the sequels, while many fans slot the third film (Die Hard: With a Vengeance) ahead of those. But despite Jake Peralta's ongoing infatuation with the series, the franchise could have easily died with 2013's dreadful fifth film, which underperformed at the box office in the United States (in addition to being objectively terrible).

Now, however, director Len Wiseman (who also helmed 2007's franchise-reviving Live Free or Die Hard) is currently in pre-production on a sixth film in the series, Die Hard: Year One, which will star both Willis and a yet-to-be-named actor playing a young John McClane in flashbacks set during the 1970s.

The films:
70 Die Hard (1988)
67 Die Hard 2: Die Harder (1990)
58 Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995)
69 Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
28 A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

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