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!

37 of 64 photo by 20th Century Fox

59.5 #26: Alien

With direction from Ridley Scott, creature design from H.R. Giger, and a star turn from then-unknown Sigourney Weaver, the 1979 classic Alien not only kicked off an ongoing multimedia franchise, it effectively created a new genre: the outer space horror film.

What followed can be broken down into three distinct groups. Alien itself received three (somewhat belated) sequels featuring Weaver's character, Ripley. James Cameron's Aliens quickly established itself as another classic, and boasts the highest Metascore and highest box office gross (adjusting for inflation) in the franchise. David Fincher made his directorial debut with the third film—the only one of the sequels without a green Metascore—while French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's fourth film received slightly better reviews though was a box office disappointment.

Overall, those four Alien films averaged an impressive 72.3. A pair of crossover films with the Predator franchise, however, each scored a lowly 29. Director Scott returned to the franchise with a pair of prequels in recent years, averaging 64.5 between them.

The films:
83 Alien (1979)
84 Aliens (1986)
59 Alien 3 (1992)
63 Alien Resurrection (1997)
29 Alien vs. Predator (2004)
29 Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem (2007)
64 Prometheus (2012)
65 Alien: Covenant (2017)

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