A-List: Top Five Movie Franchises

By J. Don Birnam

May 7, 2015

Time for a party to celebrate being #1!

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Finally, a shout-out goes to another personal favorite, the Terminator series, which will add another entry to its list this summer. Perhaps it is my affinity for dystopian, end of the world stories and my easy acceptance of time travel as a plot-furthering device, or perhaps it is the fact that at least the first two movies are expertly directed by James Cameron, but I’ve always been a big fan of this series. The last entry was arguably the weakest, with the main characters acting in ways that raised a lot of continuity issues for the franchise and made no sense given what we knew of them. Thus, this franchise doesn’t quite make the cut.

As for the top five, here we go.

5. The Batman franchise

From Michael Keaton to George Clooney and Christian Bale, the Batman franchise is one of the most beloved and most successful of all time. It was between this and Terminator for the fifth slot, only because some of the entries in the Batman series (let’s forget Val Kilmer was ever Batman, shall we?) really pull it down. Ultimately, however, Christopher Nolan’s reinvention of the franchise over the last decade was so brilliant that he pushed the whole group into the top five despite some weaker entries. What Nolan did was redefine the comic book and superhero movie from something that appealed simply to a particular fan-boy niche into something that all audiences could and did enjoy.

Indeed, after the franchise seemed dead given the debacles of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, it is no small feat that Nolan was able to revive it to such worldwide success that the franchise will continue despite Bale and Nolan’s bowing out of the projects. We shall see whether the newer films add or subtract from the quality of the group as a whole but, as it stands today, at least five of the seven movies in this franchise are solid to great films.




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4. The Lord of the Rings/Hobbit series

Landing at number four is another franchise that is hurt by the weaker elements within the group. To be sure, the Lord of the Rings franchise is one of the most commercially and critically successful of all time. Its first three entries received Best Picture nominations, a feat that only The Godfather trilogy has achieved, and one of the films won 11 Oscars, the most in history. Moreover, the series, to date constituting six films, has grossed billions of dollars worldwide.

The original trilogy is arguably one of the best trilogies ever made. Unfortunately for the group as a whole, greed and hubris likely caused individuals involved with the project to make the foolish decision to add three more movies into the mix by adapting the single novel The Hobbit into a disjointed narrative across three movies. The Hobbit would have made a fantastic four hour film, but as a series of three movies it simply does not work. Each movie simply fails to stand alone - the plot seems uneven, nonsensical, or disconnected, depending on which of the three one is looking at.

Still, the original Lord of the Rings series is so strong, beloved, and brilliant, that even with the dead weight of The Hobbit movies, it lands at least at the fourth spot of the list. It likely would have been higher if The Hobbit had been a single movie. Instead, that third spot goes to…


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