The 10 Best Movie Franchises of the Last 10 Years

Here’s a fun (or maybe soul-crushing) game to play. The next time you’re at the movie theater, take a look at the list of showtimes and count how many of the films on the board belong to a franchise. My local theater in New York City is currently offering tickets for ten different films this coming Friday. Of those ten, six are part of ongoing series. Six! (That includes four sequels, one remake, and one spinoff, if you’d like the full accounting.)

That really puts the state of Hollywood into pretty stark relief, huh? In this day and age, movies are all about old things made new (or newish) again.

The silver lining: Some of those franchises are actually very good. They should be! With so much money and so many talented filmmakers behind them, at the very least they ought to be pretty entertaining. Today, we’re ranking the best franchises of the last ten years.

In order to qualify, a series had to release at least two films over the last decade. If a franchise, even a long-running one, released a single movie in that period, it didn’t matter how good that movie was, it could not get included. (In other words: Top Gun ain’t on this list.)

I was also looking for consistency. Star Wars released some very solid films in the last decade. It also released some of the worst blockbusters over that same period. Ultimately, I decided the highs weren’t high enough to counteract the lows. It’s tough to include anything on a list of the best franchises that churned out two borderline disasters in a decade.

So what did make the cut? Keep scrolling to see our picks:

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