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See which film franchises actually hold their quality, and which fall apart after the first entry.
Pick a franchise and the tracker lays out every film in the order it came out, then reads the shape of the run: the average, the peak, the low point and the gap between the first film and the last.
Scores are our own editorial scale out of ten, the same rubric used across the site. Nothing here is loaded from a network and nothing is stored about you.
Scores are editorial judgements, not an average of other sites. A franchise with three entries and one with four are not directly comparable on the headline number alone, which is why the shape of the run matters more than the average.
Every franchise gets summarised with a single number, and that number is almost always a lie of omission. A series that opened with an 8.6 and slid to a 5.4 averages a respectable 7.0, and so does a series that started at 5.8 and climbed to 8.2. Same average, opposite stories. If you are deciding whether to start something, or whether to keep going after a weak second film, the average is the least useful thing anybody can hand you.
This tracker exists to show the shape instead. Choose a franchise and every entry appears in release order with its own score and a bar you can compare at a glance, followed by the numbers that actually describe a run: the average, the best entry, the worst entry, and the gap between the first film and the latest. That last figure is the one we care about most, because it is signed, and the sign is the whole point. A franchise that finishes above where it started is doing something rare and worth your time.
The scores are our own editorial scale out of ten, applied with the same rubric we use everywhere else on the site. One decimal place, no half-star fudging, and no rounding up because a film was ambitious. If you want to know what a 7.4 means here against a 7.4 on IMDb, the rating converter translates between the scales, though read its own notes before treating any two numbers as interchangeable.
Two things are worth watching as you switch between franchises. The first is the drop figure: a series that finishes two points below where it started has not just made a weaker film, it has told you something about how it is being run. The second is the position of the best entry. When the best film is the first one, everything since has been an attempt to get back to a place the series already left. When the best film is the third or the fourth, the people making it are still finding things.
Bear in mind that the counts are not equal. Some franchises here have three entries and some have four, and a four-film average is a steadier number than a three-film one. Neither is a statistical exercise. This is a reading of a handful of films by people who watched all of them to the end, not a survey.
Still climbing. The rarest and most encouraging shape. A franchise that gains ground across its run is usually one where a single voice stayed in charge, or where whoever inherited it understood what the first film was actually about. The improvement is rarely about budget. It is about a series deciding what it is for, and that decision frequently arrives one film late.
Holding steady. A flat run is not a failure. A franchise that scores within a few tenths across four entries has found a repeatable standard, which is harder than it sounds and is roughly what every long-running series is trying to do. The interesting detail usually sits inside the average: a steady run with a sharp dip in the middle is a very different object from a steady run with no dip at all, and only the entry list will show you which one you have.
Falling away. The most common shape, and the one the tracker flags. A series that declines from its opening film is usually not getting worse in a straight line. It peaks in the middle, then loses the thread while trying to reproduce whatever made the peak work. When the latest entry is also the worst, the verdict line changes colour and says so plainly, because the last thing a franchise did being its weakest is the clearest warning sign there is.
The pattern behind most of the collapses is the one we wrote about at length in the sequels that beat their originals. Escalation is additive and deepening is multiplicative: a follow-up that doubles the threat while leaving the lead’s relationship to it unchanged has produced a bigger version of a scene you have already watched. Bigger is easy to fund and easy to market, which is exactly why it turns up so often, and exactly why it shows in the numbers as a peak followed by a slow leak.
The franchises that hold their level tend to do something else. They change the protagonist, the genre or the point of view, or they let real time pass and film what happened next. If you want to see what that looks like at the very top of the scale, the highest-rated films since 2020 is full of entries that had no predecessor to lean on, and our scoring rubric explains where every number in this tool comes from.
The habit worth building is checking the shape before you commit to a long series. If a franchise is four films deep and the curve is still rising, watching in release order is genuinely rewarding. If it peaked at the second film and has shed a point and a half since, you can stop there and lose nothing. That is a five-second decision, and it is the decision this tool is built to make for you.
It pairs well with the rest of what we built. Once you have finished a film, the movie rating scorecard scores it across five weighted categories rather than one gut number, which is a useful discipline when a franchise is trying to tell you a weak entry was strong. The viewing log keeps a private record of what you have watched and what you gave it, so your own running average can sit beside ours, and the critic versus audience gap is worth a look when a sequel you liked was savaged, or the reverse.
None of this is a substitute for watching the films. A curve is a summary, and summaries flatten exactly the oddities that make a series interesting: the mid-budget third entry nobody defends that you end up loving, the divisive second film a later one quietly vindicates. Use the shape to decide where to start and when to stop. Then let the films themselves change your mind.