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!

9 of 64 photo by MGM

39.5 #54: 3 Ninjas

The action-comedy family film series (about three young brothers who are trained by their grandfather in the ways of ninjahood and use their skills to bring down international criminals) spanned four releases in the '90s, each a very slight improvement over its predecessor (but none good). The first 3 Ninjas was the only one that made any impression at the box office, becoming a (very) minor success for Disney—though the studio wisely opted not to stick with the franchise, which moved over to TriStar for the remainder of its run.

The films:
36 3 Ninjas (1992)
39 3 Ninjas Kick Back (1994)
39 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up (1995)
44 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain (1998)

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