Here are the 7 most bingeworthy movie franchises — ever

What, exactly, are the best, most bingeworthy movie franchises of all time? It’s a valid question to ask as we enter full swing into the holiday season with (hopefully) ample time to binge the best and the brightest movie franchises ever. We all have our opinions on which movies should top that list. Here are our editor’s top picks of movies to revisit, rehash and connect with, like old friends.

James Bond movies

When it comes to 007, everyone has an opinion about which Bond movie is the best. With 25 films across six decades, there’s no shortage of entry points for the world’s most famous secret agent. Only six actors have officially portrayed Bond on the big screen during the last half century, and a seventh actor will surely follow at some point in the future.

As with many franchises, fans tend to latch onto their first Bond as their favorite. However, the actor who played Bond the longest — for 15 years — is Daniel Craig. Sean Connery and Roger Moore have both made more appearances than Craig, but Craig’s Bond was the only iteration of 007 to get both an onscreen origin, in 2006’s Casino Royale, and a definitive ending, in 2021’s No Time To Die. That left such an indelible imprint on the franchise that no one is sure what will come next.

Rocky/Creed movies

The Rocky franchise hasn’t hit the 50-year mark yet, but it’s only a few years away from that milestone. Across nine films, the movies have followed the ultimate underdog boxer, Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), and his protégé, Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan). And while Stallone stepped away from the franchise after Creed II, Jordan has kept the torch alive by directing Creed III and charting his own course for future sequels.

Beginning with that exhilarating scene of Rocky Balboa running through the streets of Philadelphia, each movie took us on a thrilling and emotional journey through the eyes of an underdog turned champion. Nine years after the last Rocky movie, Creed revived the franchise after a hiatus. In retrospect, Rocky IV is the most pivotal link between the two eras because it features the death of Adonis’s father, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), at the hands of Soviet strongman Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). According to Lundgren, filming Apollo’s ill-fated boxing match with Drago caused some tension between them on set.

“I like Carl,” Lundgren told Yahoo Entertainment in 2020. “But I’d worked out with Sly for five months before the picture. So I knew him pretty well. And I was a fighter, a karate champion from Europe, and I think when Carl showed up, he was like, ‘I’m gonna have to fight this guy? He seems like he’s the real thing.’ I didn’t dislike anybody on that set, but I think he got a little scared of me … Then I had to kill him, of course.”

Weathers’s onscreen son, Adonis, had a chance to redeem his father’s legacy in Creed II when he fought Drago’s equally fearsome son, Viktor Drago (Florian Munteanu). And that’s a bout worth seeing even if you haven’t watched Rocky IV.

The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit movies

This year marks the 20th anniversary of The Return of the King, the third and final film in Peter Jackson’s Academy Award-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy. Nine years later, Jackson and his collaborators revisited J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth with the first of three Hobbit films. And while the reaction to The Hobbit adaptations didn’t recapture the lightning in the bottle of the first Tolkien trilogy, Jackson remains justifiably proud of what was accomplished. In recent years, Jackson revealed that his favorite scene from The Lord of the Rings trilogy was with Andy Serkis’s Gollum in The Two Towers.

“A key thing with Gollum, as most people know, is that he’s Smeagol and he’s Gollum; it’s like a split,” Jackson told Steven Colbert in 2021. “We hadn’t gotten a scene where you really got the idea, ‘This guy is two people.’ So we knew that we needed it. So Fran [Walsh] wrote a scene where Sam and Frodo are asleep — so they can be just lumps in the bed, [and] we don’t have to have Elijah [Wood] and Sean [Astin] — and a little set.”

“And we didn’t have anyone to direct it, so I said to Fran, ‘Well you wrote it, you should go and shoot it,’” added Jackson. “So she went in there for a day, and she wrote and directed the scene, which has become kind of pretty famous now. We just realized that we needed it to really sell the idea to the audience of who this guy is.”

In the two decades since his memorable role as Gollum, Serkis has continued to impress as both a director and an actor, including his standout guest appearance during three episodes of the Star Wars spinoff series Andor in 2022. Speaking of which…

Star Wars movies

In 1977 when the first Star Wars burst onto the scene, a new standard was born for what it means to be a blockbuster hit. The first generation of fans only had the original three films, which were endlessly rewatched on cable whenever they turned up. It wasn’t until 1999 that the prequel trilogy began with The Phantom Menace. And in 2015, the sequel era began with The Force Awakens.

Star Wars fans are famously vocal about what they do and don’t like about the franchise. What they sometimes overlook is that they can curate their own viewing experience, especially since the entirety of the franchise is on Disney+. Between nine Skywalker Saga films and two spinoff flicks, the Star Wars movies are pretty easy to navigate. Things only become complicated when the TV shows are factored in.

Starting with Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series in 2008, Lucasfilm was able to further expand on the franchise’s rich mythology with new characters like Ahsoka Tano, while prominently featuring the other heroes from the prequel era. The current live-action Star Wars series on Disney+, including the recently concluded Ahsoka, are carrying the narrative into areas that haven’t been explored in the films yet.

And there’s another Star Wars film in the works. But Oscar-winning writer-director Taika Waititi says it might not hit theaters anytime soon: “What I don’t want to do is rush a Star Wars script. The world doesn’t need a rushed Star Wars.”

Marvel and Iron Man movies

While The Marvels has bombed at the box office, Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films remain some of the most successful movies ever released, with Avengers: End Game making almost $2.8 billion in 2019 in the global box office — the second most successful film in movie history behind James Cameron’s Avatar.

Marvel’s hot streak began in 2008 with the release of Iron Man, a film that revitalized Robert Downey Jr. as an A-list actor, firmly established Jon Favreau as a top-tier director and set the stage for an unprecedented shared universe of superhero movies. That’s not bad for a hero who previously wasn’t widely known outside of comic books.

Experts say choosing Iron Man as the inaugural hero was a stroke of genius. “Iron Man is a paradigm example of risk rewarded,” Ben Saunders, director of the comics studies minor at the University of Oregon, told Yahoo Entertainment earlier this year. “Everyone involved took a bit of a gamble — and boy, did it pay off … It wasn’t so much that he was the right choice, but that he was the only choice.”

Downey’s history of substance abuse and subsequent sobriety seemed to inform his performance as Tony Stark, which went a long way toward establishing one of Marvel’s heroes as a fascinating and flawed man beneath the armor.

“His willingness to play Tony as a work in progress — flawed and impulsive, and capable of being self-regarding even after resolving to do better — is a huge part of what makes his version of Iron Man someone with whom we can identify,” added Saunders. “In fact, his Tony Stark is surely one of the most consequential cinematic performances of the early 21st century. No hyberbole: Marvel Studios changed the logic [of comic book movies], and I’m not sure any of that would have happened without him as Iron Man.”

Spider-Man movies

As big as Iron Man has become in the movies, Spider-Man is still one of Marvel’s most popular heroes. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse put the exclamation point on that earlier this year when it became the second-highest-grossing film of the summer, with $381.3 million domestic, which was only behind Barbie’s incredible $636.2 million take.

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy with Tobey Maguire helped kick off the modern era of comic book movies in 2002, years before the MCU got started. Director Marc Webb rebooted the franchise in 2012 with Andrew Garfield in the lead in two Amazing Spider-Man movies. Subsequently, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man was introduced in the MCU in 2016, where he headlined his own trilogy of films. This includes Spider-Man: No Way Home, featuring Holland alongside Garfield and Maguire, as well as a few of their most memorable villains. It was one of the highest grossing MCU movies ever, making an incredible $1.89 billion at the global box office.

The animated Spider-Man movies, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse shift the focus to Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) and Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), as well as more Spider-Men and Spider-Women than you can easily count.

Alien movies

“In space, no one can hear you scream.” Ridley Scott’s Alien set the tone for almost every sci-fi horror film that came after it. But it was James Cameron’s 1986 sequel, Aliens, that transformed Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley from a survivor to a true warrior. And that had a profound effect on Milla Jovovich, an actress who went on to be an action heroine in her own right in the original Resident Evil movies and in the sci-fi classic The Fifth Element.

“As a kid I felt strong,” Jovovich told Yahoo Entertainment in 2020. “I was an only child, my dad was a very macho Eastern European man and raised me like a boy, so when I would see these movies like Die Hard and Rambo, I definitely felt under-represented. When I saw Aliens for the first time with Sigourney Weaver, it was this ‘aha’ moment. Yes! Finally there was a woman onscreen doing what I feel like I could do. Battle aliens, or battling killer robots in Terminator like Linda Hamilton.”

Weaver reprised the role of Ripley in Alien 3 and returned again as a Ripley clone in Alien: Resurrection. Since then, the franchise has continued without Weaver in two Alien vs. Predator movies, as well as two prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. But for our money, there hasn’t been a great Alien movie yet that didn’t have Weaver in a starring role. We can watch the first three Ripley movies over and over. Resurrection takes some time to get used to. But with streaming, you can take all of the time you need.