Jonathan V. Last—one of my favorite people and the editor of the truly fantastic essay collection, The Seven Deadly Virtues—suggested the other day that the Mission: Impossible franchise is, pound for pound, the best franchise ever. EVER. He doubled down on that assertion the next day, suggesting that the breadth of styles within the MI film series, combined with the fact that it had no Crystal Skull-style embarrassments, should lead us to rank it highly.
This did not seem accurate to me. So I decided to engage in some data journalism! What does The Science tell us about which franchise is best?
A few thoughts, first:
- I think JVL is right that the M:I franchise should get kudos for doing a variety of different "types" of films well. The Alien franchise also pulled this trick off: the first is a horror film, the second an action film, the third a Fincherite meditation on identity and community, and the fourth a (terrible) French action comedy. I don't really know how to distill that into crunchable numbers, however, so I'm just going to skip it.
- In the list below, I included the Alien vs. Predator films as part of the "Predator" series. And Prometheus is included under the Alien franchise.
- I skipped ranking the Bond films because, a.) I haven't seen all of them and b.) there's, like, seven thousand of them. I'm guessing it's probably somewhere in the middle of the pack.
- Like JVL, I basically punted on the comic book franchise question. I don't know what to do with the Marvel films. Really, that's a genre unto itself at this point.
After contemplating this for a bit, I decided to bust out Excel and crunch some numbers. In this first chart, I simply averaged the scores I (totally arbitrarily*) gave to each entry in the series and ranked the averages:
(Click the image above for a full-size version.) This strikes me as a rather solid ranking of franchises, if I do say so myself. I'd probably move the "Aliens" flicks a bit higher. The Fast and the Furious movies seem to be in exactly the right spot. I'm guessing some will suggest that giving Terminator: Salvation a 5 is a bit high. Perhaps. I might go a bit lower. But even a 3 would keep it at the top of this list. The big surprise to me was Lethal Weapon. I don't think I'd consider any of those flicks all time greats (though the first holds up nicely). Not screwing the pooch anywhere along the way pays off!
This list fails to take into account one of JVL's factors, however. It's not enough just to be great. A franchise must also be great without ever really embarrassing itself. Hence the "delta" measure, which I define in the following chart as the drop off between the best and the worst entry. When we add the delta and the average, things change a bit:
I like this list much less. You'll note that it doesn't improve Mission: Impossible's ranking at all. Bourne is way too high. Rambo too. Indiana Jones drops down to tenth? Yikes. One thing worth noting: I don't really have a problem with the Jurassic Park franchise's placement at the bottom. Let's be honest: There's one great—truly, remarkably, still-holds-up-today great—flick in those three, but the rest of the series is trash. Twos are probably generous. As a wise Tibetan monk once said, "If you wrap dog turds around a filet, you've still got a shit sandwich."
The real problem with the "delta" measure is that, ironically, it dings films with an outstanding entry far more than it dings a series with several bottom-feeders. (I'm looking at you, Resident Evil.) So how do we tweak the delta in a way that better represents a series' overall quality? How about [best film] - [average of two worst films]? That improves things slightly, but not by a ton.
That helps a bit in the middle of the pack—the idea that the Indiana Jones series is worse than either Resident Evil or Fast and Furious is risible—but screws up the top even more. There's no way that the Bourne franchise is the best action film franchise out there. I don't care what The Science says. I deny you, Science. I deny you.
I dunno, I'm not a fancy math whiz. I graduated from a public university that is currently best known for its kids faking gang rape allegations. I'd never hack it at Wonk Blog. This is why they pay Nate Silver the big bucks. Maybe he can figure out a better formula.
*A true scientician would've, I dunno, used Rotten Tomato scores or something.** Fortunately, I happen to be a film critic. And my off-the-top-of-the-head scores are always right, so I didn't need to consult some idiotic aggregation service like a common plebe.
**Some top-of-my-head math suggests this might have helped with the "delta" problem we see in the next two charts. For instance: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull clocked in at 78 percent fresh. Think about that the next time you consider consulting Rotten Tomatoes.