Off-Topic: The Best Movie Series of All Time

With the recent spate of sequels, prequels, reboots and remakes, I was curious what people consider the best film series of all time.  Searching the web provided some individual lists and a compilation based on IMDB scores, but I could not get any sense of the completeness of these lists.  Did they look at every film series?  How did they rank them?

As an alternative, I compiled a list of every movies series I could find and ranked them according to their Rotten Tomatoes rating.  Every film in each series is weighted equally, so it doesn't matter how great Jaws scores (100 rating) if Jaws: The Revenge is wretched (0 rating).

One big caveat: Because I used Rotten Tomatoes, this is probably more appropriately titled "The Most Consistently Good Film Series of All Time."  Rotten Tomatoes' scoring simply reflects is it worth seeing, not how great it is.  So, Mad Max and Evil Dead edge The Godfather because of The Godfather III's low score.

Without further ado, the top ten film series based on Rotten Tomatoes scores:

	Film Series	Rotten Tomatoes Average
1	Toy Story	99.67
2	Man w/ No Name	96.33
3	Lord of the Rings	94.00
4	Mad Max	92.00
5	Evil Dead	89.33
6	Godfather	88.67
7	Iron Man	86.67
8	Indiana Jones	86.25
9	Harry Potter	84.88
10	The Thin Man	83.50

The bottom five?

78	Resident Evil	25.25
79	Police Academy	21.40
80	Highlander	20.75
81	Leprechaun	17.00
82	Beethoven	14.50

For the full list, click here.

Some brief notes:

• To be included on the list, a series had to have at least three entries. Also, no loosely connected films (like Baz Luhrmann's Red Curtain trilogy or Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy) are on here.
• Horror (not surprisingly) receives little love from critics.  Evil Dead, Paranormal Activity and Scream are the only three in the top half of the list.  There are 12 in the bottom half.
• Comedies are terrible as well in the long run.  Unless you count Back to the Future or The Muppets, The Naked Gun series was the highest entry at 31.
• Rocky (one of my personal faves) just makes the top half of the list at 41.  Not surprised that Rocky V was hated.  Shocked that Rocky III and IV (Drago!) were.
• Batman is all the way down at  number 30 (thanks Joel Schumacher!) 
• There are two instances where one film counts for two series.  Iron Man and Hulk both include The Avengers (which really helps their score). Friday the 13th's and Nightmare on Elm Street's tallies include Freddy vs. Jason (helping Jason, but not Freddy)
• Nine movies had zero ratings.  Leprechaun, Beethoven and Police Academy account for 2/3 of those zeroes.
• Nine movies also had perfect 100s.  Toy Story is the only series with two films at that score.
• Jaws is the only film series to boast a 100 and a zero rating.  
• I stayed away from characters who have become omnipresent (Zorro, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Frankestein, etc.).  It's harder to figure out what the series there would be.

If you look at the full list and see a series you think I missed, let me know in the comments.

Photo credit: CHUD