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!

55 of 64 photo by Baldur Bragason/Columbia TriStar

68.3 #8 (tie): Millennium Series

Swedish author Stieg Larsson's best-selling trilogy of crime novels was first adapted in Scandinavia in 2009 with a trio of films released just months apart that year (and extended into a Swedish television miniseries that aired the following year). The first two of those films, directed by Niels Arden Oplev (who later directed the acclaimed pilot for TV's Mr. Robot and, less successfully, the 2017 remake of Flatliners) and Daniel Alfredson, received positive reviews. All three starred Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist.

In 2011, David Fincher directed an American remake/re-adaptation of the first novel, with Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig heading the cast. That film was expected, like the original, to be followed by two sequels based on the next two books. Numerous efforts to make that happen didn't pan out, and the franchise will instead be rebooted with a new cast and director with a film based on The Girl in the Spider's Web, the first book in the series written (by David Lagercrantz) after Larsson's death in 2004.

The films:
76 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
66 The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009)
60 The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2009)
71 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

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