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!

51 of 64 photo by Henson/Disney

65.6 #12: The Muppets

Jim Henson's beloved puppet characters actually date back to the 1950s, appearing on TV in a variety of shows in every decade since (most famously in Sesame Street and The Muppet Show). The Muppets made the transition to the big screen in 1979 with The Muppet Movie, a beloved family movie classic.

While, arguably, no subsequent Muppet movie was able to quite recapture the magic of the first, six of the seven follow-ups were well reviewed. The sole dud is 1999's Muppets From Space, the first in the series not directed by Jim Henson, his son Brian, or longtime puppeteer Frank Oz and also the only Muppet film that isn't a musical.

It seemed for a while like that misfire could be the end of the Muppet franchise on the big screen, but an acquisition by Disney revived the property, leading to a pair of fairly successful films earlier this decade directed by James Bobin.

The films:
74 The Muppet Movie (1979)
70 The Great Muppet Caper (1981)
64 The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)
64 The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
64 Muppet Treasure Island (1996)
53 Muppets from Space (1999)
75 The Muppets (2011)
61 Muppets Most Wanted (2014)

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