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!

46 of 64 photo by 20th Century Fox

62.4 #16 (tie): Planet of the Apes

Originally based on a 1963 French novel, the 50-year-old sci-fi film franchise encompasses three distinct periods (not including the musical version). The first period, spanning 1968-1973, includes five films, the first of which (starring Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowall) is considered a sci-fi classic. Only one of the sequels received positive reviews, and the five films averaged 56.6.

But when that film (and a subsequent TV spinoff that aired just 14 episodes in 1974) bombed, the franchise went dormant until Tim Burton directed a remake in 2001 starring Mark Wahlberg. Critics didn't like it much (it scored 50), and while the film performed decently at the box office, distributor 20th Century Fox opted against greenlighting a sequel.

Instead, the franchise was rebooted a second time in 2011 with a modern, big-budget origin story directed by Rupert Wyatt. That film kicked off an impressive trilogy that averaged 76.3and grossed over $1.6 billion worldwide. The trilogy's concluding chapter—the ninth Apes film to date—is the highest-scoring entry in the franchise.

The films:
79 Planet of the Apes (1968)
46 Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)
69 Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)
49 Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
40 Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)
50 Planet of the Apes (2001)
68 Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
79 Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)
82 War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

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