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!
Though the character of Spider-Man has existed in print since 1962 and first appeared on television in the 1970s (with some of the TV episodes screening in theaters outside of the United States), he didn't get his own live-action feature film until 2002, with a film directed by Sam Raimi starring Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker. That film kicked off a wildly successful trilogy—with one good and one lesser sequel—averaging 71.7 and grossing a combined $2.5 billion.
In 2012, Marc Webb directed a reboot, followed by a sequel two years later. Despite their titles, those Andrew Garfield-starring films were slightly less than amazing, averaging just 59.5 and grossing less than any of the original trilogy films. Spider-Man has since joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where he has received one dedicated film so far with Tom Holland taking the lead—with both better critical and commercial results than the Andrew Garfield films. (Holland has also appeared as Spider-Man as part of the ensemble in several other MCU films, which we aren't including in the Spider-Man average score.)
Before Holland returns in next summer's Spider-Man: Far From Home, an unrelated animated film (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) will open in theaters in December, featuring the voice of Shameik Moore as Spider-Man.
The films:
73 Spider-Man (2002)
83 Spider-Man 2 (2004)
59 Spider-Man 3 (2007)
66 The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
53 The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)
73 Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)