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!

40 of 64 photo by Warner Bros.

60.8 #23: Dirty Harry

Nearly 40 franchises into our countdown, we have finally reached the first series with an average score in the green. What makes that so surprising is that in this case, that solid average is due to just one film: the 1971 Clint Eastwood classic Dirty Harry, one of five collaborations between the star and director Don Siegel.

Eastwood would return to play the violent San Francisco cop Harry Callahan four additional times over the next 17 years (each with a different director, including Eastwood himself for Sudden Impact), but none of the sequels received positive reviews from critics.

The films:
90 Dirty Harry (1971)
58 Magnum Force (1973)
58 The Enforcer (1976)
52 Sudden Impact (1983)
46 The Dead Pool (1988)

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