Marvel Cinematic Universe

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• Top 6 Movie Franchises of All Time

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• Star Wars

  Star Wars began in 1977 with George Lucas's original film, made on a modest budget by a director whose previous work had given 20th Century Fox little confidence in the project's commercial prospects, before it became one of the highest-grossing films of all time and launched a franchise now spanning nine core "Skywalker Saga" films alongside numerous spinoffs and television series. The franchise's merchandising strategy, in which Lucas famously retained the toy and licensing rights in exchange for a reduced directing fee, became one of the most consequential business decisions in film history, generating far more revenue over subsequent decades than the films' box-office receipts alone. Star Wars's blend of samurai film influences, mythological hero's-journey story structure drawn partly from scholar Joseph Campbell's writing, and groundbreaking practical and, later, digital visual effects set a technical and narrative template that reshaped how Hollywood approached big-budget science fiction and fantasy filmmaking. Disney's 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm for more than $4 billion and subsequent sequel trilogy, spinoff films, and streaming series have extended the franchise's commercial life for another generation, and Star Wars remains one of the most culturally pervasive media franchises in entertainment history, spanning film, television, publishing, and merchandising simultaneously.

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• James Bond

  The James Bond franchise, beginning with 1962's Dr. No, is the longest continuously running film franchise in history, spanning more than six decades and 25 official films produced by the same production company, Eon Productions, held by the Broccoli family across multiple generations of ownership. Six different actors have played Bond across the franchise's official film series, and each recasting has typically been accompanied by a deliberate tonal shift — from Sean Connery's more traditionally suave portrayal to Daniel Craig's grittier, more emotionally vulnerable 21st-century interpretation — allowing the franchise to evolve stylistically across dramatically different film eras. The films' consistent formula — exotic international locations, elaborate action sequences, distinctive gadgets developed by the character Q, and a recurring title sequence and theme song format — established narrative and stylistic conventions that countless subsequent spy and action films have directly imitated or referenced. Bond's continued commercial viability across six decades, despite significant shifts in audience tastes, geopolitical context, and changing cultural attitudes toward the character's originally more overt sexism, reflects a franchise that's repeatedly reinvented its core formula enough to remain commercially and critically relevant across an unusually long span of film history.

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• Harry Potter

  The Harry Potter film franchise, based on J.K. Rowling's seven-book series, adapted its source material across eight films released between 2001 and 2011, largely retaining its core young cast — Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint — across the entire decade-long production, giving audiences a rare opportunity to watch child actors age into adulthood within the same continuous franchise. The franchise's combined box-office gross places it among the highest-earning film series in history, and its success is credited with helping sustain the young-adult fantasy film genre's commercial viability throughout the 2000s, directly influencing the greenlighting of numerous subsequent book-to-film fantasy adaptations. The Warner Bros. Studio Tour in Leavesden, England, built around preserved sets and props from the original films, has become one of the United Kingdom's most visited tourist attractions, reflecting the franchise's sustained commercial afterlife well beyond its theatrical release window. The franchise's later extensions, including the Fantastic Beasts prequel spinoff films and a stage play sequel, have had more mixed critical and commercial reception than the original series, and increasing public controversy surrounding author J.K. Rowling's statements on transgender issues has complicated the franchise's broader cultural standing in the years since the original films concluded.

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• The Lord of the Rings

  Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, filmed simultaneously across New Zealand between 1999 and 2000 and released one film per year from 2001 to 2003, is widely regarded as one of the most successful and technically ambitious literary adaptations in film history, based on J.R.R. Tolkien's foundational fantasy novels. The trilogy's final installment, The Return of the King, swept all 11 Academy Awards it was nominated for at the 2004 ceremony, including Best Picture, tying the record for most Oscar wins by a single film and making it, at the time, the only fantasy film ever to win Best Picture. The production's decision to film all three movies simultaneously over an extended continuous shoot, rather than making each film separately with years between productions, was itself a significant risk that required massive upfront financing but ultimately let Jackson maintain narrative and visual consistency across the entire trilogy. The films' extensive use of New Zealand's landscape as a stand-in for Middle-earth transformed the country into a major film tourism destination, and Jackson's Weta Workshop, built to produce the trilogy's practical effects and creature designs, has become one of the most significant visual effects studios in the film industry.

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• Star Trek

  Star Trek began as a television series in 1966 and, despite low ratings during its original three-season run, built such a devoted fan following through syndicated reruns that it eventually spawned an ongoing film franchise beginning with 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, more than a decade after the original show's cancellation. The franchise's fan community is widely credited as one of the earliest and most organized examples of modern fandom culture, including the first major fan-organized convention circuit, and Star Trek fans, or "Trekkies," helped establish templates for fan engagement that later franchises across film and television have directly built upon. The series' 1982 film The Wrath of Khan is frequently cited as one of the best sequels in film history and helped establish the template for successfully continuing a franchise's storyline across theatrical films with a returning television cast, well before shared cinematic universes became a standard industry strategy. J.J. Abrams's 2009 reboot film successfully introduced the franchise to a new generation of viewers through a soft-reboot approach that preserved core characters and concepts while updating the visual style and pacing for contemporary blockbuster audiences, extending the franchise's theatrical film viability more than four decades after its television debut.

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More in Film & TV

• Hidden Figures

  "Hidden Figures" (2016), directed by Theodore Melfi, dramatizes the true story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three Black women mathematicians whose calculations at NASA were critical to the success of the early American space program, based on Margot Lee Shetterly's nonfiction book of the same name. The film brought significant mainstream public attention to the real contributions of Black women "computers" at NASA during the Space Race, a history that had received relatively little prior widespread recognition, and it prompted renewed public interest in and honors for the real Katherine Johnson, who was still alive at the time of the film's release. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe's central performances drew significant critical acclaim, and the film became a notable box office success, outperforming many contemporary awards-season dramas and demonstrating a substantial mainstream audience for historical stories centered on Black women. Hidden Figures's combination of its overdue mainstream spotlight on real, previously under-recognized NASA scientists and its strong central performances has made it one of the most culturally significant true-story films of its decade.

• 12 Years a Slave

  "12 Years a Slave" (2013), directed by Steve McQueen, dramatizes the true story of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the antebellum South, based on Northup's own 1853 memoir of the same name. Chiwetel Ejiofor's lead performance and Lupita Nyong'o's supporting performance, in her film debut, both drew significant critical acclaim, with Nyong'o winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the film itself won the Academy Award for Best Picture. McQueen's unflinching, sustained visual approach to depicting the brutality of slavery, including several extended, unbroken takes of violence that the camera refuses to look away from, was widely credited with giving American slavery a more direct and confrontational cinematic treatment than most previous major studio films had attempted. 12 Years a Slave's combination of its direct grounding in Solomon Northup's own historical memoir and Steve McQueen's unflinching directorial approach has made it one of the most acclaimed and historically significant true-story films ever produced.

• Catch Me If You Can

  "Catch Me If You Can" (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, dramatizes the real early life of Frank Abagnale Jr., who successfully impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer while forging millions of dollars in checks before being caught by an FBI agent, played by Tom Hanks. The film was based on Abagnale's own memoir, and the real Abagnale, who later became a longtime security consultant working with the FBI, served as a consultant on the production, giving the filmmakers direct access to the actual details and methods behind his real-life cons. The film's stylish, buoyant tone and 1960s period production design, paired with John Williams's jazz-inflected score, gave the true story a lighter, more playful cinematic register than many other crime-based true stories, emphasizing the audacious cleverness of Abagnale's real schemes over their consequences. Catch Me If You Can's combination of its direct access to the real Frank Abagnale's own account and its stylish period filmmaking has made it one of the most purely entertaining true-story films ever produced.

• Erin Brockovich

  "Erin Brockovich" (2000), directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Julia Roberts, dramatizes the true story of the real Erin Brockovich, an unemployed single mother who, working as a legal clerk, helped build a massive lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric over water contamination in Hinkley, California. Roberts's performance won her the Academy Award for Best Actress, and her portrayal of the real Brockovich's brash, persistent determination in the face of both corporate stonewalling and professional condescension became one of the most acclaimed performances of her career. The real underlying case resulted in a $333 million settlement, at the time the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history, and the real Erin Brockovich served as a consultant on the film and appeared in a small cameo role. Erin Brockovich's combination of Julia Roberts's Oscar-winning lead performance and its grounding in one of the largest environmental settlements in American legal history has made it one of the most acclaimed true-story legal dramas ever produced.

• The Social Network

  "The Social Network" (2010), directed by David Fincher from Aaron Sorkin's screenplay, dramatizes the founding of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University and the subsequent legal disputes with his co-founders and the Winklevoss twins over credit and ownership of the company. Sorkin's screenplay, built around competing depositions and conflicting accounts of the same events, embraced the genuine ambiguity of the real underlying legal disputes rather than presenting a single definitive version of what happened, a structural choice widely praised by critics as an unusually sophisticated approach to dramatizing contested recent history. Jesse Eisenberg's performance as a fictionalized version of Zuckerberg drew significant critical acclaim, and the film's release while the real Facebook was still a relatively young and rapidly growing company gave it an unusually immediate, real-time quality rare for a historical biopic. The Social Network's combination of its sophisticated multi-perspective legal-dispute structure and its unusually immediate proximity to still-unfolding real events has made it one of the most critically acclaimed true-story films of the 21st century.