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!

45 of 64 photo by MGM

62.4 #16 (tie): Hannibal Lecter

There are only two good films in what ultimately became a five-film (and one television show) series based on the novels by Thomas Harris, but those two are very good indeed.

Jonathan Demme's 1991 classic The Silence of the Lambs is the only thing close to a horror film to ever win the Oscar for best picture. And the excellent though little-seen at the time 1986 thriller Manhunter, directed (appropriately enough) by Michael Mann, is one of only two films in the series not to star Anthony Hopkins as the serial killer Hannibal Lecter. In Mann's film, Lecter is portrayed by Brian Cox, while in the dreadful prequel Hannibal Rising, Gaspard Ulliel steps into the role.

The films:
75 Manhunter (1986)
85 The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
57 Hannibal (2001)
60 Red Dragon (2002)
35 Hannibal Rising (2007)

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