2024’s franchise blockbusters, ranked by their value to the series

In Hollywood, the question “Does this movie franchise need another chapter?” seems to have a pretty easy answer: “Sure, if we think it’ll still make money!” For fans of a given franchise, though, the calculations are more complicated. Will that new installment in a movie series actually add anything worthwhile to the story, or just undermine the franchise’s original successes? Do we actually want to know more about our favorite characters, or will prequels and spinoffs ruin them? Do we have any reason to believe the latest movie using a familiar IP has a reason to exist that isn’t entirely mercenary? Will it at least be some big dumb fun? While plenty of 2024’s would-be IP blockbusters have shifted to 2025 dates, the year so far has still seen its share of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs. So we’re running the numbers, ranking the year’s latest-in-a-series movies by how well they justify their existence — both as movies, and as installments in ongoing stories. 16. The Strangers: Chapter 1 [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25477922/MCDSTCH_LG025.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] A remake of 2008’s home-invasion horror movie The Strangers wasn’t necessary, but it could have been good: With a premise as solid gold as “masked strangers break into a remote home and kill the couple vacationing there,” there are a million different takes that could have been great horror fodder that doesn’t follow the original movie beat for beat. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the uninspired approach director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2) takes with this movie, the first in a planned trilogy that was originally written as one massive four-hour-plus movie, until Legendary Entertainment broke it down into chunks. This new batch of Strangers movies is meant to follow the characters in the aftermath of this initial home invasion. But it kicks off with Harlin essentially remaking the first Strangers with less style and dread. Gone is the slow creepiness of the original movie, replaced by rushed horror sequences and a few moments of lackluster action. While it’s possible that parts 2 and 3 somehow redeem the kickoff, Chapter 1 is nothing more than a significantly worse retread of an effective shocker. —Austen Goslin 15. Madame Web [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25477924/MCDMAWE_CO027.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Madame Web is only loosely connected to Sony’s already loosely connected universe of Marvel characters. Ironic, given that the tagline “Her web connects them all” was the central focus of all the teasers. The one thing this offers to longtime fans of the current live-action Spider-Man narrative is a tease about Peter Parker’s existence — something that’s always been a big question mark in the Sony Marvel movies. Paramedic Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson) is friends with Peter’s (hot, young, not yet dead in a morally instructive way) Uncle Ben, after all! Except the film never actually acknowledges that Ben’s newborn nephew is Peter Parker, to the point where holding back on that detail becomes something like a bit. It’s almost pandering, but not indulgent enough to feel fulfilling at all. With its stilted dialogue and nonsensical plot, Madame Web is not a good movie at all. At least it’s the sort of terrible movie that’s fun to watch in a group setting, while making jokes and tuning out the slower bits? It’s more or less Cats for superhero fans. —Petrana Radulovic 14. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25346175/DF_03606_03589_03605_r_2000x1337_thumbnail.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] This sequel to a sequelish reboot brings the new generation of Ghostbusters (Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, etc.) back to New York, and brings back the original characters (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, etc.) for more than a glorified cameo. That might be enough to make it essential for superfans, but for everyone else, it’s a nostalgic callback to the original movie with not much new or engaging to make it stand out, apart from Grace’s character’s maybe-queer storyline with a cute ghost girl. —PR 13. Despicable Me 4 [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/MCDDEME_UV029.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] No one in the Despicable Me movies seems to age. Former supervillain Gru (Steve Carell) looks just like he did in the first movie, and so do his daughters, who have been children for 14 years now. And yet somehow, Gru and his wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) pursued a relationship, got married, and had a baby. So at least there’s some sense of time passing, even if it seems like Gru Jr. might be an infant for the next decade of sequels. Despicable Me 4 contributes a few fun new world-building elements to the franchise, though it unfortunately doesn’t explore them enough to make them significant. Still, some of them could set the stage for future adventures. (A whole school for villains?) This installment also adds a small but absolutely hilarious detail to Gru’s past, a backstory involving a high school talent show and the song “Karma Chameleon.” Nothing about Despicable Me 4 is essential, but it’s cool to see a few more funky details about this broadly defined world. —PR 12. Bad Boys: Ride or Die [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25477934/MCDBABO_CO038.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] The fourth entry in the series Michael Bay inadvertently kicked off with his directorial debut Bad Boys back in 1995 brings back a lot of cast members — chiefly the Bad Boys themselves, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. But the filmmakers clearly think Bad Boys fans want a lot more continuity than that. Screenwriters Chris Bremner and Will Beall do their best to build a Fast & Furious-style Bad Boys universe out of every bit of character work and villain lore they can scrap together from the previous three movies. That isn’t a compliment. Where so many blockbuster movies suffer because the studio is trying to launch a profitable franchise instead of telling a decent story, Ride or Die assumes viewers are coming to the theater armed with nostalgia and a detail-oriented fascination with lore, rather than just wanting to see a couple of gifted comedic actors mouth off at each other between frenetic action sequences. Fans who care deeply about the posthumous legacy of Joe Pantoliano’s character, this is your movie. But mostly, the franchise-building gets in the way of the fun. —TR 11. Alien: Romulus [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/g_alienromulus_3216_5_3d7ca4d9.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all] Fede Álvarez’s 2024 installment in the Alien franchise is almost perversely defined by how much it copies from past Alien movies, and how little it adds to the canon: Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues can’t even conjure up their own catchphrase, and fall back on having a new character echo the series’ most famous line. The film is effectively creepy as a stand-alone, and for viewers who’ve never seen an Alien movie, this might all be new, exciting horror fare. But it’d still come across as a bit underexplained, since this film is aimed directly at people who know the franchise forward and backward. It’s a greatest-hits montage, more or less: Remember how creepy Xenomorphs are in water? Let’s do that again. Chestbursters, facehuggers, Giger-esque genital imagery, evil androids suborning ships for the company — that was cool! More of that! And so forth. It’s a good time at the movies, but it could hardly be less essential. —TR 10. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25440663/KPA_TP3_00087671.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] The fourth in the new-era Planet of the Apes movies (and the 10th Apes movie if you batch them all together) doesn’t add much to the franchise’s ongoing narrative — it jumps the story forward in time about 300 years for a story that’s frustratingly half-baked and surprisingly familiar from the previous entry, War for the Planet of the Apes, but with a gorilla dictator running a forced work camp instead of a human one. There are some powerful ideas at work — that history repeats itself, that communities are stronger than individuals, and that those communities need to band together to resist tyrants — but they aren’t communicated particularly clearly, especially since they’re mixed in with other threads, about a personal journey undercut by every Kingdom ad, and about the unreliability and unknowability of humanity. Kingdom is enjoyable enough in the moment, an action blockbuster with impressive visual effects and some appealing characters. It isn’t a bad or boring entry in the series. It just never feels essential, or like it’s doing much besides echoing more propulsive, dynamic earlier entries in this run at the Apes story. —TR 9. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25346038/rev_1_GXK_FP_001rv3_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all] Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire feels like the movie where the new MonsterVerse franchise hit its stride. While 2014’s Godzilla lightly parodies disaster movies and 2017’s Kong: Skull Island does the same for dark war movies, Godzilla x Kong is a buddy movie about a giant ape and a nuclear lizard who don’t like each other much, but are often forced to team up to fight bigger monsters. It’s inescapably dumb and uncomplicatedly entertaining. But what makes this franchise especially fun right now is that it has a secret weapon: television. While the big screen is reserved for silly monster brawls, the MonsterVerse’s TV show, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, is a much more reserved, character-focused family drama that feels like an old-school adventure movie with giant monsters thrown in. It’s an excellent counterbalance to the silly fun of movies like A New Empire, with the added bonus that the movie’s story likely means Kong will be in the show’s next season. The MonsterVerse is a strange franchise, but as long as every entry keeps proving itself entertaining, it’s awfully hard to complain. —AG 8. Kung Fu Panda 4 [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25477947/MCDKUFU_UV055.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] The adventures of panda kung fu master Po (Jack Black) could’ve been wrapped up in the series’ third installment back in 2016, but Kung Fu Panda 4 adds a bit of a postscript. The door is now open for another unlikely hero to take over the franchise, should DreamWorks decide to go that route: Basically, Po will eventually retire from his title as the Dragon Warrior, and a protégé will take up the mantle. (That definitely isn’t how it worked in the first movie, but I digress.) His heir apparent, the sneaky, thieving fox Zhen (Awkwafina), is actually a pretty cool character. I wouldn’t be too mad seeing more of her! For the fourth movie in an animated series, Kung Fu Panda 4 is decently enjoyable, mostly suffering from wasted potential. But the fight scenes are still cool, and the humor is funny enough, even if it never reaches the highs of the originals. —PR 7. The First Omen [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25477958/MCDFIOM_H3007.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] The First Omen is a complicated addition to this list. On the one hand, it isn’t necessary, really. And its worst moments come at the close of the movie, when the implied connections to the original film series are made even more explicit than they already were. The First Omen does, however, earn its place on this list via an entirely different version of this metric: It might just be the best movie in the Omen series, which makes it a necessity by default. Even better, by making a movie this scary, director and co-writer Arkasha Stevenson (Brand New Cherry Flavor) actually retroactively improves the rest of Damien’s story, just by making his origins this disturbing. The First Omen is simply an excellent horror movie, and that’s more than we can say for most franchise entries on this list, which is exactly why it clawed its way near the top. —AG 6. Ultraman: Rising [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25490449/Ultraman__Rising_u_01_33_04_07_Comp_02_R.jpg_Ultraman__Rising_u_01_33_04_07_Comp_02_R.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Netflix’s animated Ultraman movie isn’t following a strict franchise continuity like so many of the sequels, prequels, and spinoffs in this ranking. Instead, it’s part of a sprawling history of anime, manga, comics, books, live-action movies and shows, and much more, many of which reinvent the tokusatsu hero in radically different ways. This particular installment also focuses far more on repackaging Ultraman for a new generation than on tapping into or expanding his existing lore. In this case, its value to the franchise isn’t additive, it’s introductory: This is a fine, accessible place for new and younger viewers to step into the story, especially if they happen to be fans of creative, dynamic animation. Longtime Ultraman fans won’t learn anything radically new here, but they will get a perfect launch point for the next generation of fans. —TR 5. Inside Out 2 [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25490551/INSIDE_OUT_2_ONLINE_USE_i250_136cQ_pub.pub16.2941.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Pixar’s sequel to 2015’s Inside Out is the definition of a sequel expanding on a previous movie, sometimes to a fault. The first movie goes inside the head of 11-year-old Riley to explore how her personified emotions interact with each other; the sequel ages her up to 13, introduces new emotion characters, and shoves her into a series of new, anxiety-related decisions. In a lot of ways, this is a more-of-the-same sequel, leaning on a similar “important characters lost in the back of Riley’s brain, other characters taking over at center stage” plot, and plenty of the same corny-to-clever puns about how familiar thoughts, emotions, or related structures might manifest as landscape features. But the way it recognizably tells a story about the same central characters, while focusing on how profoundly time and the events of the last movie changed them, is unusual for an animated sequel. (We’re side-eying you right now, eternally-suspended-in-time Despicable Me franchise.) Inside Out 2 forwards Riley’s evolution in meaningful ways, even if that does raise some bigger questions about the rules of this particular world. —TR 4. A Quiet Place: Day One [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25508983/MCDAUPL_PA004.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] You’d have to go back a few years to Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator franchise movie Prey to find a prequel that feels as vital, engaging, and meaningful to a film series as A Quiet Place: Day One — and it’s notable that both movies get to that point the same way. They both keep continuity with the stories they’re setting up, but neither one is trying to dole out unnecessary series lore, or explain things that never needed explaining: They’re both just telling riveting action stories in an established setting, and shifting focus to completely different characters with their own unique dynamics. Most disaster movies in this vein (whether they’re alien-invasion-focused or not) center on survivors. Writer-director Michael Sarnoski tunes in on someone who doesn’t have survival as an option: Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) is in the last weeks of a fatal illness, and when killer aliens start raining from the skies and chumming New York City and anyone in it who makes a noise, it’s barely moving up the time table on her mortality. Sarnoski gives her a perversely meaningless goal — to get across town to her favorite pizza place and enjoy a final slice before she dies — and then spends half the movie on taut, tense alien-stalking scenes, and the rest on exploring why she’s so doggedly determined to do this one last thing before she goes. The focus on her combination of fatalism and obsession makes Day One an indelible story that expands the Quiet Place franchise in the best way possible, without piling on a bunch of extra, unnecessary world-building. —TR 3. Deadpool & Wolverine [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25463167/TDW_14349_R.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Deadpool’s third live-action adventure, and his first under the Disney-Marvel Studios banner, certainly earns high rankings for popularity: It has broken records on its way to the top of the box office. But more significantly for the purposes of this particular ranking, it pushes Deadpool’s story forward, to the extent that anything really means anything in a Deadpool movie. Death certainly doesn’t. It’s possible that MCU canon does. Narrative rigor and character continuity don’t — but who goes to a Deadpool movie for those? The snark is tamer and less transgressive this time out, but the Deadpool & Wolverine movie is still ambitious about expanding the character’s reach into new arenas, from bringing in the Loki series’ Time Variance Authority as villains to letting him beg for a shot at joining the Avengers. You can really feel producer-star Ryan Reynolds, his co-writers, and director Shawn Levy leveraging the Deadpool franchise’s popularity to get their hands on any property they want, from gleefully defiling the end of 2017’s Logan to lining up cameos designed expressly for in-the-know comics fans. They hop around Marvel movie continuity, grabbing and dropping whatever they want like nerdy magpies, and the movie is more fun for it. Most franchise filmmakers could only dream of this kind of freedom and access. Say what you want about the recent movie-multiverse boom — at least one franchise is just using it to create a bigger, more colorful sandbox. —TR 2. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25463824/Shotgun.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Furiosa is the rare prequel that feels not just equal to the hit movie it’s setting up, but like it adds vital context rather than gilding the lily. Conceived and written at the same time as Max Max: Fury Road so it would be consistent with that film’s story and characterization, Furiosa doesn’t unnecessarily just fill in how-did-this-character-get-here blanks, it tells its own distinct story and answers questions about who Fury Road’s most compelling new character is, and why she’s Max’s equal. More importantly, though, it’s wildly entertaining in its own right. —TR 1. Dune: Part Two [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25317625/rev_1_DUN2_44606rv2_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all] The second half (or with luck, middle third) of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation has an advantage no other movie on this list has: It isn’t just an adjunct to other movies, it’s the vital continuation of an opening-act movie that was mostly setup, building to this payoff. Even leaving aside the compelling performances and visuals, the epic warfare, and the fascinating shift in perspective — which is to say, leaving aside the fact that it’s one of 2024’s best movies so far — Dune: Part Two would top this list purely because it’s an essential part of its franchise’s story. It doesn’t just contribute new things to a franchise, it’s a cornerstone of the story Villeneuve is still hoping he’ll get to tell more of someday. —TR