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!

48 of 64 photo by Paramount Pictures

62.5 #15: Star Trek

The beloved sci-fi franchise includes six live-action TV series (dating back to 1966), one animated series, and 13 feature films. The latter fall into three categories, differentiated by their casts.

The first six films (including Wrath of Khan, widely considered the franchise's high point despite not having the highest score) feature the stars of the original series, and average 58.2. The next four films, with the cast from Star Trek: The Next Generation, average 60. Director J.J. Abrams rebooted the film series in 2009 by enlisting a new cast to play the original series characters. These "Kelvin timeline" films have an average of 74 so far, and two additional titles are now in development (including one that may be directed by Quentin Tarantino).

The films:
48 Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
66 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
56 Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
71 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
43 Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)
65 Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
55 Star Trek Generations (1994)
71 Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
64 Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
51 Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
82 Star Trek (2009)
72 Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
68 Star Trek Beyond (2016)

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