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!

53 of 64 photo by Lucasfilm, Ltd.

68.0 #10: Indiana Jones

What happens when the two filmmakers who reinvented the big-screen blockbuster united at the peak of their powers? Movie magic, at least in 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, a cinema classic and one of the biggest box office hits in history.

Harrison Ford would return three more times to play archaeologist Indiana Jones for director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas (who developed the original concept and stories for each film), and each was a box office hit though none quite matched the quality of the original film. A fifth feature—with Ford returning one last time—is currently in pre-production with an eye toward a 2021 release. A spin-off television series ran for three seasons on ABC in the 1990s.

Yes, that's a positive score you see below for 2008's Kingdom of the Crystal Skull—we don't get it, either.

The films:
85 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
57 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
65 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
65 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

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