Top 3 Highest Grossing Movie Franchise of All Time

What's more fun than a movie? A collection of intricately interconnected movies with the same characters and setting. A movie franchise, or simply movie series, is a collection of related movie films in succession that share the same fictional universe or marketed as a series. 

 

Movie franchises bring in a lot of audiences since there is a community of viewers anticipating the next movie installment usually released in consecutive years. You're probably familiar with a lot of them: "The Lord of the Rings", "The Fast and the Furious", "James Bond", "The Hunger Games" and many more. 

 

Since talk of movie franchises is very exciting, especially those who stan these films (these are my personal favorites), let's go on with the top 3 highest-grossing movie franchises of all time:

 

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3rd Spot: Wizarding World (US $ 9.19 Billion)

The Harry Potter film series is based on JK Rowling's famous book series of the same name. The last book was divided into two movies, making a total of 8 movies for Harry Potter. Another set of movies in the franchise is Fantastic Beasts which is a spin-off and prequel to the original movie series. The first movie "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" was aired in 2001 while the last movie installment "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows-Part 11" was aired in 2011. Meanwhile, the Fantastic Beasts movies were aired 2016 and 2018 respectively. 

 

The story centers on famous friend-trio Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) who are students of Hogwartz School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. 

 

 

Photo courtesy: https://www.latfusa.com/article/2017/12/what-star-wars-films-popular-franchise-movies-rank/

2nd Spot: Star Wars (US$ 10.3 Billion)

Star Wars is a franchise literally for different generations because it has aired different sets of movies for 5 decades. It has an original trilogy (1977, 1980, 1983), a prequel trilogy (1999, 2002, 2005), and a sequel trilogy (2015, 2017, 2019), having a total of 9 films, and 2 anthology films. 

 

The movie franchise is clearly embedded in today's popular culture. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is number 4 in the highest-grossing films of all time. Star Wars is an American epic space opera media franchise created by George Lucas. It is set on its own fictional universe and its lead characters include Han Solo, Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Yoda, and many more. 

 

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1st Spot: Marvel Cinematic Universe (US$ 22.5 Billion)

Marvel Cinematic Universe is composed of 22 films divided into three phases. Phase 1 starts from "The Incredible Hulk" (2008) to "Avengers" (2012). Phase two is from "Iron Man 3" (2013) to "Ant-Man" (2015). Lastly, Phase 3 is from "Captain America Civil War" (2016) to "Spider-Man: Far From Home" (2019). 

 

For eleven years, people have known these superheroes individually in their own films and have watched them come together in the 4 Avengers movies. This movie franchise is based on famous Marvel Comic Books. Stan Lee, co-creator of these characters, had a cameo role in every movie until "Avengers: End Game" before his death in 2018.