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!

38 of 64 photo by Paramount Pictures

59.6 #25: Jack Ryan

Novelist Tom Clancy's most enduring character—so enduring that he continues to appear in new books despite Clancy's death—has appeared on the big screen five times, played by four actors: Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, and Chris Pine. Ford is the only member of that group to play the Marine-turned-CIA agent twice, and those happen to be the only two well-reviewed films in the franchise (both directed by Phillip Noyce).

Various efforts to make a sixth film have been underway (off and on) for years, but nothing has come to fruition yet. But the character is headed to the small screen later this month in Amazon's new Prime Video series Jack Ryan, with The Office's John Krasinski playing Ryan. We don't know yet how good that series will be, but Amazon has already renewed it for a second season, meaning that Krasinski could become the actor most associated with the character.

The films:
58 The Hunt for Red October (1990)
64 Patriot Games (1992)
74 Clear and Present Danger (1994)
45 The Sum of All Fears (2002)
57 Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)

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