Every Film Franchise, Ranked
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!
The original trio of X-Men films ended on a sour note when a less capable Brett Ratner replaced Bryan Singer as director. Then, a prequel centering on Wolverine took the franchise to a new commercial and critical nadir before Matthew Vaughn rebooted the series in 2011 with First Class.
The following years brought six more films. Two of those, from director James Mangold, redeemed the character of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), including 2017's Logan, the best-reviewed X-Men film to date. Singer also returned to the franchise for a pair of films—one (Days of Future Past) good, one (Apocalypse) not so much—while a spin-off series focusing on the character of Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) brought the franchise to new commercial heights as the highest-grossing X-Men films to date in the U.S.
Things look to be getting only busier in the X-Men universe. In addition to two currently airing TV shows (Legion and The Gifted), a pair of films are scheduled for release in 2019: Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants, though a planned third film (Gambit, starring Channing Tatum) seems a bit iffier. But with the recent merger of Disney and 21st Century Fox, it seems inevitable that the X-Men franchise—after all, a Marvel Comics property—will be merged into the Marvel Cinematic Universe sooner rather than later.
The films:
64 X-Men (2000)
68 X2: X-Men United (2003)
58 X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
40 X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
65 X-Men: First Class (2011)
61 The Wolverine (2013)
75 X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
65 Deadpool (2016)
52 X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)
77 Logan (2017)
66 Deadpool 2 (2018)