Who Are the Most Franchise-Focused Actors Ever?

As his scene-stealing—no, film–stealing—performance in Gladiator II has reminded millions of viewers, Denzel Washington has long been a franchise unto himself. For the first 40 years of his career, though, Denzel didn’t do franchise films. Not until his 2014 thriller, The Equalizer, received a sequel, 2018’s The Equalizer 2, could Denzel officially be said to have starred in a big-screen series. (Granted, as an adaptation of a 1980s TV show, The Equalizer was technically part of a franchise from the start.)

Yet as he nears his 70th birthday, Washington has officially entered his franchise era. Denzel continues to say that he doesn’t have many more movies left in him, but he’s planning to make at least three more sequels, much like Gladiator II. Washington recently revealed that Ryan Coogler is writing a role for him in Black Panther 3, which will be the actor’s entrée into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Denzel also disclosed that he’s making two more movies in the Equalizer series—to this point, a trilogy—for the very valid reason that “people love those daggone Equalizers.”

Speaking to Australia’s Today earlier this month, Denzel said, “I don’t know how many more films I’m going to make. It’s probably not that many. I want to do things I haven’t done.” Until fairly recently, franchise films were something Denzel hadn’t done. But he’s making up for lost sequel opportunities.

Then again, there are more sequel opportunities to go around these days than there were early in Denzel’s career. It’s not so much that Denzel has entered his franchise era as it is that Hollywood has: Studios love those daggone sequels, and audiences seemingly love them, too. The top 12 earners at the global box office this year are sequels, and Gladiator II and Moana 2 should soon give sequels possession of the top 14. Denzel, like so many other major stars, is just along for the franchise ride.

For an example of a star who illustrates the franchise-forward nature of acting today, we need look no further than one of Washington’s Gladiator II castmates, Pedro Pascal. Pascal is 20 years younger than Washington, but he’s easily outstripped the two-time Oscar winner’s franchise count. In addition to Gladiator, Pascal has appeared in Star Wars (thanks to TV series The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, as well as the upcoming movie The Mandalorian & Grogu), Narcos (all three seasons of the original series), Kingsman (Kingsman: The Golden Circle), the DC Extended Universe (Wonder Woman 1984), Game of Thrones (as Oberyn Martell in Season 4), and The Last of Us (a show adapted from a video game). He even crossed The Equalizer off his franchise to-do list, appearing alongside Denzel in The Equalizer 2. And like Denzel, he’s due to make his MCU debut soon, in next year’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps. If a part in a prominent franchise opens up, Pascal will play it.

Pascal has crammed a lot of franchise roles into the five years since his breakout on The Mandalorian, but some actors, of course, have accumulated credits in franchises for decades. So in honor of Gladiator’s graduation to the franchise ranks, Denzel’s late-career franchise arc, and Pascal’s increasingly promiscuous approach to high-profile franchises, we set out to crown the all-time franchise kings and queens of the screen.

Making this seemingly simple choice turns out to be quite complicated because it requires us to consider several follow-ups. What, exactly, qualifies as a franchise? Can we incorporate trans-media franchises (that is, those that span movies and TV)? How should we weigh franchises’ respective levels of popularity and actors’ centrality within those properties? Which metrics most accurately represent an actor’s franchise reliance? And ought we era adjust the stats to account for the franchise creep captured by the chart above?

To tackle these questions, we started with a list from Rating Graph of more than a thousand film franchises that we supplemented with a manually curated list of dozens of the biggest TV franchises. We then pulled data from the Movie Database on the actors who appeared in each of those franchise films or TV shows. After eliminating listed “franchises” that featured only one release or lacked actor information, we were left with roughly 660 franchises and almost 88,000 roles. We then gathered IMDb data on each release, including its average user score, number of user ratings, and “popularity” (how often it’s searched for relative to other properties).

There are a few downsides or trade-offs of this methodology. For one, it excludes multimedia properties such as The Last of Us, which features only one release in TV or film (so far). For another, it omits minor TV roles, which is mostly a positive—we wouldn’t want to give a one-episode extra the same weight as a star in our franchise calculus—but can be a drawback in some cases. Oberyn Martell was a memorable addition to Game of Thrones, but he appeared in only seven episodes (and one season) of a 73-episode (and eight-season) series, so Pascal was too far down the Thrones call sheet for that part to register for our purposes. Sorry, Pedro; clearly, you haven’t been busy enough. Our efforts also snub voice actors and stuntpeople, who play a crucial role in numerous franchises but (especially in the stuntpeople’s cases) tend not to be the faces of those series. (Apologies to the likes of Thomas Rosales Jr., George Cheung, Derek Mears, Michael Papajohn, and Emily Brobst.)

One issue we ran into was a Harry Potter problem: When we refrained from adjusting for franchise length, we found that actors from the Harry Potter franchise tended to dominate the rankings by virtue of appearing in eight well-known and fairly highly rated installments. To avoid a leaderboard with a heavy Hogwarts skew, we calculated a single score for each franchise based on its component movies’ or shows’ average user rating, number of votes, and popularity, and then we assigned each qualifying actor that average score once, no matter how many movies they helped make in a single franchise. Thus, the Harry Potter regulars got credit for having Harry on their bingo cards once, rather than receiving octuple the House points for their Potter output.

We also compensated somewhat for the skyrocketing totals of franchise releases in recent years by assessing how franchise friendly each actor was by the standards of their day. To do that, we applied baseball-stats-style era adjustments to the filmographies of all actors with three or more franchise roles. For each of these actors’ credits, we looked at how many franchise films came out the same year, as a percentage of all movies released. By repeating that process for each role on their résumé, we could calculate a baseline number of franchise roles they would have been expected to play, based on when and how often they acted. By comparing that estimate to their actual career record of franchise roles, we could determine how pronounced their affinity for franchises was.

That’s enough preamble; let’s look at leaderboards.

This first table simply displays the leaders in cumulative roles in individual franchise movies or TV shows, along with the average ratings and vote totals of their franchise projects. Unsurprisingly, this list leans toward longtime action stars. For film actors (as opposed to TV actors), smaller roles are included, which explains the presence of prolific MCU cameo maker Stan Lee, as well as of Warwick Davis (Harry Potter, Star Wars, Willow) and Desmond Llewelyn (who played Q in many a James Bond film). But among the high-wattage stars, Samuel L. Jackson (Star Wars, MCU, and many, many more) easily lays claim to the title of franchise champion. Stellan Skarsgard (Star Wars, MCU, Dune, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc.) is almost sneakily elite in the franchise department, and Chris Hemsworth (MCU, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, Mad Max, Men in Black, Extraction) places high even though he’s a good deal younger than the actors he trails. Both Skarsgard and Hemsworth narrowly top Harrison Ford, although the man who played Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Rick Deckard, and Jack Ryan will also soon join the MCU.

This next view presents the leaders in terms of the number of individual franchises they’ve appeared in, regardless of the tally of total roles. Jackson still leads, but not by nearly as wide a margin this time: Danny Trejo trails by only four franchises. As the low average popularity and vote count of Trejo’s entries suggest, some of his franchises tend to be obscure or low budget—starting with one of his first credited roles, in 1987’s Death Wish 4: The Crackdown—but the B movie icon keeps collecting more. Shout-out to all-time “that guy” Richard Riehle, who places fourth.

The next table lists the leaders in terms of cumulative user ratings for the franchises they’ve starred in, with each franchise counting once toward the title—a metric that combines quantity and popularity, because bigger-name franchises tend to draw more votes. This look reveals some new names, including Djimon Hounsou (MCU, DCEU, A Quiet Place, Gladiator, Rebel Moon, and more), Karl Urban (MCU, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, Judge Dredd, Riddick, Bourne, The Boys), J.K. Simmons (MCU, Spider-Man, DCEU, Kung Fu Panda), Andy Serkis (Star Wars, MCU, The Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes, Batman), Woody Harrelson (Star Wars, The Hunger Games, Venom, Planet of the Apes, Zombieland), and megastars such as Idris Elba (MCU, Star Trek, Alien, Fast & Furious) and Will Smith (Men in Black, Bad Boys, Independence Day). Yet again, though, Jackson reigns supreme, just edging out Willem Dafoe (MCU, Spider-Man, DCEU, Jack Ryan, Beetlejuice, John Wick).

There’s one list Jackson doesn’t lead: the one with the actors whose highest percentage of roles is in franchise projects. (Jackson may be Mr. Franchise, but he’s also played so many non-franchise parts that his franchise rate isn’t extreme.) Jason Statham (The Transporter, The Expendables, Fast & Furious, The Meg) shows up as the most franchise-dependent star, along with repeat appearers Hemsworth, Lee, Urban, and Hounsou, plus first-time leaderboard luminaries Seann William Scott (American PIe, Final Destination, Ice Age) and Michelle Rodriguez (Fast & Furious, Resident Evil, Avatar).

Actually, let’s make that two consecutive leaderboards on which Jackson doesn’t appear. This one presents the actors whose franchise projects had the highest average user rating. They weren’t necessarily in the most franchise films or shows, but they picked their spots skillfully—and, perhaps, helped elevate the finished product through their own performances. (Alan Rickman, we miss you.)

That last table has something the preceding ones were mostly missing: women. Movie casts still skew male, and our sample is no exception. Among actors with at least three franchise films, women have been in 14 fewer films of all kinds, on average, than men. Although the percentage of roles coming from franchise films and shows doesn’t differ significantly by gender, there is a clear disparity at the upper end. Of the actors in our sample with fewer than 10 franchise roles, 75 percent are men. Among the actors with 10 or more franchise movies, 85 percent are men. There’s a real deficit of prolific, franchise-focused, female stars. So it seems fitting to share one more table on which Jackson is nowhere to be seen: a list of the women with the most franchise roles, from the late Maggie Smith (Harry Potter, Downton Abbey) to scream queens like Lin Shaye (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Critters) and Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween) to the boundary-breaking, ass-kicking Sigourney Weaver (Alien, Ghostbusters, Avatar, and in 2026, Star Wars).

In the end, though, we have to tip our Kangols to Samuel L., the master to so many franchise apprentices. Not only did he deliver a speech about bringing together a group of remarkable people, but he’s also portrayed a group of remarkable characters himself. Unless you count Lee, Jackson is the undisputed king of career franchise roles—and no surprise pivot by Denzel or hot streak by Pascal can change that. So let’s close with a table that will look a lot like the one we opened with: an era-adjusted leaderboard of franchise roles above the baseline expectation.

And with that, this party’s over.