Top 15 Dumbest Movie Franchises of All Time

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Ignacio Weil

Entertainment - December 2nd 2025, 17:00 GMT+1

Cropped jurassic world dominion — 15. Jurassic World

Some films give you dinosaurs – *Jurassic World* gives you dinosaur-themed chaos dressed up as a family blockbuster. Dinosaurs escape, people scream, and somehow the park’s Wi-Fi is still working. It trades subtlety for spectacle, delivering rampaging reptiles, clichéd heroics, and CGI galore. Yet even when it leans hard into spectacle-over-substance territory, it’s hard not to admit: there’s something deliciously absurd about seeing a T-rex redecorate a theme park with broken fences and panicked tourists. The franchise churns out sequel after sequel, which says a lot about our appetite for chaos in three-dimensional motion. | © Universal Pictures

Cropped Saw X — 14. Saw

Watching the *Saw* franchise sometimes feels less like horror and more like an endurance test for your will to keep paying attention. Its plots often tangle into knots with people wrenching metaphors out of earwax and moral dilemmas posed as trap puzzles, and at some point the cleverness feels like cartoonish cruelty for the sake of shock. With every new sequel, it gets harder to remember who’s pulling the strings, what rule they broke, or why we’re still rooting for the victims. And yet, these movies keep getting made. Maybe we’re drawn to the chaos, the twisted morality plays, or simply the challenge of surviving another sequel. Whatever the reason, the franchise continues, reminding us how hungry Hollywood can be for gore… and ticket sales. | © Lionsgate

Cropped The Purge — 13. The Purge

Sometimes it seems like the *Purge* movies ask: “What’s the worst you can imagine, and how badly do you want to watch it?” The premise is simple (and disturbing): one night a year, all crime is legal, and anything goes. The first time it felt edgy: a social critique disguised as horror. But as sequels rolled out, the social commentary often got lost under explosions, loud shouting, and characters making the worst possible decisions, just so the plot could keep going. The result? A franchise that thrives on chaos, loud scares, and moral confusion. It can be fun in the moment – the adrenaline, the anxiety – but look back later and you might ask: why did I subject myself to that? And yet, here we are. | © Universal Pictures

Cropped Star Wars episode ix — 12. Star Wars

The most recent *Star Wars* trilogy feels like it’s trying to juggle nostalgia, new ideas, and fan demands, and dropping at least one ball every time. You get dazzling space battles and occasional flashbacks to the original trilogy’s glory, but also plot threads that vanish faster than Han Solo’s smirk and character motivations that shift with the wind. Some moments land – there’s spectacle, lightsabers, wild planet-hopping – but other times it collapses under its own ambition, ending up feeling like a messy patchwork of fan service and spectacle without much spine. It’s a wild ride: exhilarating, maddening, and a bit exhausting, like arguing with relatives over which Star Wars is “the real Star Wars.” | © Walt Disney Pictures

Cropped Resident Evil movie — 11. Resident Evil

If you want movies that treat logic as optional and zombie heads as pinatas, the *Resident Evil* franchise delivers – and sometimes overdelivers. Each film piles more explosions, monsters, and improbable escape routes onto the previous one, until what started as a survival horror adaptation becomes an action-scifi free-for-all. There’s gunplay, grand settings, and absurd stunts that laugh in the face of realism. And yet, there’s a certain charm in its chaos: the gritty mix of horror and action becomes almost its own aesthetic, not unlike a B-movie that knows it’s B but embraces it. In that sense, the strangeness is part of the appeal – the kind of movies where suspension of disbelief isn’t a courtesy, it’s a requirement. | © Constantin Film

Cropped American Pie — 10. American Pie

The wildest part about this series is how confidently it marches into disaster, as if awkwardness were a renewable energy source. Every film feels like someone dared the writers to top the last catastrophe, and nobody involved had the self-control to say no. The characters stumble through life with the elegance of collapsed furniture, yet their chaos somehow defines the franchise’s charm. The humor ages in unpredictable ways – sometimes delightfully, sometimes like dairy left in the sun – but its earnest stupidity remains oddly endearing. Teen hormones, bad advice, and terrible timing fuel a universe where embarrassment is a daily workout. And despite all the absurd decisions, it carved out a permanent place in pop culture by sheer force of cringe. | © Universal Pictures

Cropped Friday the 13th — 9. Friday the 13th

Camping at Crystal Lake should be classified as a poor life choice by now, yet this franchise behaves as though the lesson never quite lands. Each movie brings back Jason with the enthusiasm of a theme park attraction that refuses to shut down for maintenance. The plots drift between remix and déjà vu, giving the series a strange, looping rhythm that fans have somehow embraced. Bodies drop, cabins creak, counselors scatter, and the whole thing unfolds with the predictability of a ritual, just with more machetes. What it lacks in narrative ambition, it compensates for in sheer commitment to the bit, doubling down on every slasher cliché imaginable. It’s messy, repetitive, and gloriously unapologetic about both. | © Paramount Pictures

Cropped Transformers The Last Knight — 8. Transformers

Watching this franchise is like being strapped to the hood of a semi-truck that refuses to stop drifting while someone shouts exposition through a megaphone. Every movie escalates the spectacle until it feels like the explosions are competing with each other for screen time. The robots move with such frantic energy that entire action scenes blur into metallic confetti, and the human characters largely exist to stare upward in confusion. Logic doesn’t just take a back seat but gets launched into orbit with the same enthusiasm they fired a car into space once. But there’s a strange charm in the bombastic excess, as if the films fully understand that subtlety was never invited. It’s loud, chaotic, and somehow impossible to look away from. | © Paramount Pictures

Cropped Fast X — 7. The Fast and the Furious

Somewhere along the timeline, this series transitioned from street racers arguing about quarter-miles to operatives capable of saving the world using nothing but torque and family values. The transformation wasn’t subtle, but the franchise embraced it with a grin and a NOS tank. Suddenly cars were flipping submarines, outrunning drones, and defying gravity like it owed them money. Characters survive explosions with the durability of enchanted armor, all while giving melodramatic speeches that treat automotive loyalty as a sacred oath. And despite how unhinged the action becomes, the movies are bizarrely proud of their own excess. It’s a soap opera on wheels, powered by physics violations and sheer confidence. | © Universal Pictures

Cropped Twilight New Moon — 6. Twilight

This saga dives headfirst into supernatural melodrama, wrapping every emotion in enough intensity to melt granite. Every scene feels like an unspoken argument between destiny and indecision, with characters communicating primarily through heavy breathing and slow-motion staring. The romance is dramatic enough to cause weather patterns, while the werewolf-vampire rivalry escalates with the seriousness of global diplomacy. The tonal swings from sparkling vampires to CGI wolf pack therapy sessions create a universe where sincerity overrides logic at every turn. And yet, the commitment to its own dramatic gravity gives the series a hypnotic pull. It’s dreamy, it’s clumsy, it’s over the top, and it somehow became the defining supernatural soap opera of its era. | © Summit Entertainment

Cropped 50 Shades of Grey — 5. 50 Shades of Grey

Somehow this trilogy turned awkward corporate flirting and poorly negotiated relationships into a pop-culture juggernaut, all while pretending it was far edgier than it actually was. The films juggle romance, melodrama, and questionable interior-design choices with the grace of a falling chandelier. Dialogue often lands like unfinished drafts, yet the franchise delivers its seriousness with absolute confidence, as if passion alone could patch every narrative hole. The chemistry wavers between smoldering and mildly confused, creating a tone that feels both committed and strangely hesitant. Yet there’s something perversely entertaining about how dramatically it treats even the simplest interactions. It never fully works, but it never stops trying, either. | © Universal Pictures

Cropped Divergent — 4. Divergent

This series had the ambition to ride the wave of dystopian YA blockbusters, but the tide receded halfway through and left it stranded with a final installment that never got made. The world-building starts out intriguing enough, then slowly collapses under the weight of its own faction system, which makes less sense the longer you think about it. Characters spend entire movies explaining rules that change whenever the plot gets stuck, turning the story into a maze with missing walls. The tone swings between serious rebellion and teen-drama confusion, creating a strange mix of urgency and “wait, who made this decision?” Yet despite the chaos, the franchise remains a fascinating time capsule of an era when every studio wanted the next big dystopian hit. | © Summit Entertainment

Cropped Alvin the Chipmunks — 3. Alvin & the Chipmunks

There’s an odd charm in watching three CGI rodents wreak havoc on the human world while singing pop hits like tiny karaoke gremlins. The humor aims straight for the lowest possible shelf, then proudly stays there for four films with no intention of climbing higher. Every plot beats with the same predictable rhythm: chaos, shrieking, misunderstanding, redemption, repeat. Yet the series somehow kept pulling families into theaters, likely because the chipmunks operate on pure, unfiltered enthusiasm. The movies lean into silliness with zero hesitation, embracing their own nonsense with wide-eyed sincerity. It’s loud, sugar-fueled, and the cinematic equivalent of a Saturday-morning sugar rush. | © 20th Century Fox

Cropped Now You See Me Now You Dont — 2. Now You See Me

The franchise tries to sell itself as sleek, clever, and impossibly twisty, yet the magic tricks often behave like physics-breaking plot devices conjured by overcaffeinated screenwriters. Every reveal arrives with the confidence of a master illusionist, even when the logic behind it collapses like a cheap card tower. Characters deliver dramatic monologues about misdirection while performing miracles that feel one step away from actual superpowers. It’s flashy, frantic, and constantly sprinting to stay ahead of its own story. And although the twists rarely make sense in hindsight, the franchise is committed to the spectacle above all else. Style wins, coherence loses, and somehow that became the brand. | © Summit Entertainment

Cropped Morbius — 1. Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters

This cinematic universe manages to feel like fanfiction written during a caffeine binge, stitched together by studio optimism and sheer hope that recognizable names will distract from everything else. Villains get standalone movies where they aren’t really villainous, heroes appear in stories where they barely feel heroic, and plots often exist just to gesture vaguely toward a future crossover that may never actually arrive. The tone jumps between gritty seriousness and accidental comedy, creating movies that feel like they wandered in from different genres entirely. Yet the ambition to build a franchise out of characters who were never meant to anchor one is almost admirable in its chaos. It’s bold, messy, unintentionally hilarious, and a masterclass in cinematic confusion. | © Sony Pictures

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Some film series are masterpieces, some are guilty pleasures… and then there are the ones that feel like they were engineered in a lab to make you question every creative decision involved. This list celebrates those gloriously baffling franchises – the ones that keep getting sequels despite logic, taste, or basic narrative coherence. And somehow, we still watch them.

Whether it’s monsters with impossible survival rates, romances with the depth of a damp napkin, or action heroes who apparently don’t understand physics, these franchises remind us that cinema can be wonderfully chaotic. So buckle up: it’s time to revisit the sagas that made us laugh, cringe, and occasionally wonder who approved the script.