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!

41 of 64 photo by MGM

61.1 #22: Rocky

Over 40 years since its launch, the Rocky franchise is still going strong, with its best-reviewed installment ever coming in 2015, seven films in.

But John G. Avildsen's 1976 original, of course, is a contender for the title of greatest boxing movie ever made. That film made an instant star of then-unknown character actor Sylvester Stallone, who was nominated for two Oscars: one for his performance and another for his screenplay.

With that film a surprising but massive hit (collecting over $225 million in grosses against a tiny $1 million budget), Stallone would return to play boxer Rocky Balboa six more times. The sequels gradually declined in quality throughout the 1980s, though they weren't without their memorable characters (including Mr. T's Clubber Lang in Rocky III and Dolph Lundgren's Ivan Drago in the huge hit Rocky IV).

Stallone directed films 2 through 4 before Avildsen returned for the fifth chapter. After a 16-year hiatus, Stallone revived the franchise with Rocky Balboa, a surprisingly decent comeback. In 2015, writer-director Ryan Coogler (who would later direct Black Panther) rebooted the franchise with Creed, a hugely acclaimed film starring Michael B. Jordan as a young fighter (the son of the original film's Apollo Creed) who trains under Stallone's Rocky. A sequel, directed by Steven Caple Jr. but co-written by Stallone, is due in November.

The films:
70 Rocky (1976)
61 Rocky II (1979)
57 Rocky III (1982)
40 Rocky IV (1985)
55 Rocky V (1990)
63 Rocky Balboa (2006)
82 Creed (2015)

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