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!

7 of 64 photo by Chip Bergman/Lionsgate

39.3 #56: Tyler Perry's Madea

Writer-director-producer-actor Tyler Perry's interminable multimedia series (in which he appears in drag as an elderly black woman modeled after his own mother and aunt) spans 10 live-action feature films (with another due next year), 10 plays, a book, an animated film (released straight to video and not included in the average above), and several TV programs in which Madea has made at least an appearance. None of them are good, at least according to critics.

The films:
36 Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005)
45 Madea's Family Reunion (2006)
45 Meet the Browns (2008)
50 Madea Goes to Jail (2009)
55 I Can Do Bad All by Myself (2009)
45 Madea's Big Happy Family (2011)
42 Madea's Witness Protection (2012)
28 A Madea Christmas (2013)
30 Boo! A Madea Halloween (2016)
17 Boo 2! A Madea Halloween (2017)

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