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!
It's both the highest-scoring comic book franchise and the most lucrative series in cinema history.
Yes, there were prior films based on characters from Marvel comics, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe—linked films that share characters and are produced by the comic publisher's own Marvel Studios, owned since 2009 by Disney—officially kicked off with 2008's Iron Man. An astounding 19 films followed, combining to gross an even more mind-blowing $17.3 billion. Avengers: Infinity War, still in a few theaters after opening as one of three MCU releases this year, is now the fourth-highest-grossing film in history, and is creeping up on Star Wars: The Force Awakens at #3.
Don't expect Disney to let up from its three-Marvel-films-a-year pace anytime soon. On tap for 2019 are Captain Marvel, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and the sequel to Avengers: Infinity War. (And we're not even mentioning the dozen past, current, and future television series set in the MCU.)
The films:
79 Iron Man (2008)
61 The Incredible Hulk (2008)
57 Iron Man 2 (2010)
57 Thor (2011)
66 Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
69 Marvel's The Avengers (2012)
62 Iron Man 3 (2013)
54 Thor: The Dark World (2013)
70 Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
76 Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
66 Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
64 Ant-Man (2015)
75 Captain America: Civil War (2016)
72 Doctor Strange (2016)
67 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
73 Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
74 Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
88 Black Panther (2018)
68 Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
70 Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)