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!

42 of 64 photo by Warner Bros./MGM

61.3 #21: Barbershop

The Chicago-set comedy franchise includes four films, most of which feature a cast led by Cedric the Entertainer and Ice Cube (with one, Beauty Shop, a spinoff centering on Queen Latifah's Barbershop 2 character). Two of those films are good: the original 2002 Barbershop, directed by Tim Story, and the most recent installment, The Next Cut, directed by Malcolm D. Lee. The franchise also produced a short-lived Showtime television spinoff starring Omar Gooding in Ice Cube's role.

The films:
66 Barbershop (2002)
59 Barbershop 2: Back in Business (2004)
53 Beauty Shop (2005)
67 Barbershop: The Next Cut (2016)

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