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!

59 of 64 photo by Paramount Pictures

69.7 #4: Mission: Impossible

Call it Franchise: Improbable. In 1996, director Brian De Palma took a television property that last aired 23 years prior and turned it into a so-so action movie starring Tom Cruise. But the film was a hit, leading into a so-so sequel four years later, directed by John Woo.

The sequel also performed well at the box office, as has each of the following four installments. The first one to receive good reviews was the J.J. Abrams-directed M:I3. And each subsequent outing—one from Pixar director Brad Bird, two from screenwriter-turned-director Christopher McQuarrie—has been even better than the one before it, with the just-released Fallout ranking among the very best action movies of the current century.

The films:
59 Mission: Impossible (1996)
59 Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)
66 Mission: Impossible III (2006)
73 Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)
75 Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)
86 Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

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