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!

4 of 64

34.8 #59: Ernest

Hey Vern, you must remember Jim Varney's character Ernest P. Worrell, an advertising agency creation who became ubiquitous on local television commercials in the 1980s before landing his own short-lived Saturday morning TV series (Hey Vern, It's Ernest) and a surprisingly long-lived (though unsurprisingly terrible) film franchise. Five different Ernest films (listed below and averaged above) played in theaters, and those were followed by another four titles released straight to video. The latter group includes Ernest Goes to Africa, a film described by Uproxx as "the most racist kids' movie ever made."

The films:
24 Ernest Goes to Camp (1987)
44 Ernest Saves Christmas (1988)
40 Ernest Goes to Jail (1990)
38 Ernest Scared Stupid (1991)
28 Ernest Rides Again (1993)

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