The Most Successful Film Franchises Of All Time Revealed

Hollywood blockbusters and successful film franchises have become the cornerstone of what we’ve come to know as modern cinema. Over the years, we have kept on getting new movie franchises and new blockbusters. However, some movie franchises have become a lot more successful than others. Some of them have gone on to garner huge fan support, verging on cultism, and other attempted franchises have just vanished into nothingness.

In this article, we’re going to go over the most successful film franchises of all time, and, maybe, try to figure out which is the very best ever. I know that money doesn’t always mean everything, but it’s vital in the continuation of a franchise, and it certainly helps in its longevity and ability to spawn other sorts of media: toys, merchandise, spinoff movies, sequels, and even TV shows on streaming platforms in some of these franchises’ case.

What are the most successful film franchises of all time?

Credit: Betway

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Betway has shared a recent blog post in which they revealed which are the most successful film franchises of all time. They did this by creating an index that looked at the following key things:

• The highest-grossing film franchises
• The highest-rated film franchises
• The franchises that have won the most awards
• The franchises that have the most returning cast members
• The most searched-for franchises

So, according to their research, they discovered that the most successful film franchise of all time is (can you guess it?), Star Wars. I mean, that’s a bit of a no-brainer. However, some of the franchise’s numbers are just in another galaxy! Betway revealed that the movies have had huge box office takings of $10.3B (£8.9B) and won 348 awards. The film series has an overall average IMDb rating of 7.3 and has 4,066,600 searches for its movie titles.

They then went on to reveal that the Spider-Man movie series ended up in second place, which is quite the coup for Sony Pictures. They ended up with an overall score of 65.3 out of 90, according to Betway’s metrics. The wall-crawler managed to come away with in an impressive $8.3B (£7.1B) at the box office, and the films have received a respectable overall IMDb rating of 7.3/10 overall. The Spider-Man films have won 184 awards, and it should come as no surprise that Spider-Man’s fans have searched for the film’s titles a whopping 17,632,000 times.

Then, in third place, we have the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which ended up with an overall score of 62.7 out of 90. The Marvel movies have raked in an astronomical $27.4B (£23.7B) in profit from their box office takings, and the movies have received a total of 555 awards. The film series has seen fans searching for its movie titles 43,221,000 times.

What are the most profitable movie franchises of all time?

Credit: Betway

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However, the interesting thing is that the ‘most successful’ movie franchises weren’t necessarily the ‘most profitable’. Betway’s findings also revealed that the top three highest grossing franchises ever made were: Marvel, Star Wars and then Harry Potter, in that order.

This comes as a bit of a surprise; however, it does have to be said that there have been more MCU, Star Wars and Harry Potter films than Spider-Man movies. So, why did the Spider-Man franchise end up in the ‘most successful’ top three, but not in the ‘highest grossing’?

Well, it has to do with the fact that the Spider-Man franchise had more awards than the Harry Potter and Star Wars franchises, and it was also searched more on the Internet than all the other franchises. It seems as though people are far more interested in Spider-Man movies than the Star Wars, MCU and Harry Potter ones, which is a very interesting takeaway from this report.

Which big franchise failed to perform?

Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

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When reading through Betway’s findings, I was struck by one thing. There’s one pretty big movie franchise that didn’t do too well in their metrics, and that was the DC Extended Universe. The Warner Bros-owned franchise failed to end up in the top five in any of the report’s metrics, and I think this is actually pretty telling about the state of DC’s movies and TV shows moving forward.

I’m pretty sure that Warner Bros Discovery executives would have been looking at these sorts of metrics and would have expected their DC movies to be up there with the likes of the MCU and the Spider-Man films.

This could be one of the big reasons Warner Bros Discovery opted to hire James Gunn and Peter Safran as the new co-CEOs of the newly formed DC Studios. Perhaps together, Gunn and Safran can get their DC content up at the very top of these lists in time.

What do you make of this news? Are you a fan of any of these huge Hollywood movie franchises mentioned in this article? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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