Good luck trying to go through these massive film franchises.
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Films — Animation
- The Disney Animated Canon: Wish is the 62nd movie. It would take exactly one day just to watch all 19 of the Walt-era films (Snow White to Jungle Book) and 73 hours and 59 minutes, or three days without sleep, to watch the first 54 features consecutively. Pixar's output adds on another 26 as of Lightyear while Blue Sky Studios' output adds on 13, with their final film before their shutdown being Spies in Disguise. And that's not counting the direct-to-video sequels and spin-off series, or other animated output (or output that partially features their animation, such as The Reluctant Dragon and Song of the South) from Disney. And if you're truly insane there's also Kingdom Hearts (which has its own entry elsewhere on this page) and its parent series Final Fantasy. Good luck.
- The Land Before Time has a total of thirteen sequels and a television series consisting of 26 episodes.
- This very wiki has pages on 37 Barbie animated productions, mostly feature length direct to video films.
Films — Live-Action
- Star Wars is one of the biggest media franchises around, consisting of nine numbered movies, numerous spin-off films and television series, a monstrous amount of comics, hundreds of novels, over a hundred video games, and other assorted materials. Luckily for newcomers, the franchise underwent a Continuity Reboot in 2014 which trimmed the "canon" down to just the theatrical movies, certain animated shows, and all new material published after the reboot, meaning there's a much smaller pool of books and comics to catch up on, for now.
- Besides their massive menagerie of animated features and shorts, the Walt Disney company has made a staggering amount of live-action movies; there were 67 live-action films made during Walt's lifetime alone, and the company has made hundreds more since then, and isn't stopping anytime soon. (Mitigating this somewhat are a large proportion of the films from the 1990s onward, many of which are either remakes of earlier live-action films or live-action adaptations of the animated films, and thus may be skipped if one is not a completist.)
- Alfred Hitchcock's filmography has over 50 films, from various studios and releases. It would take a week to watch all of his extant films.
- James Bond (25 official movies and still ongoing, and three non-Eon Productions movies; God help you if you watch them non-stop...
). - If you wanted to show those film buffs who's boss and knock off the entire Criterion Collection, it's going to take some time. There are 1000+ entries (some of which contain 3 or 4 full-length films or a multitude of short films). So even if you watched one movie every day, it would take you nearly three years. Don't forget the occasional title like Berlin Alexanderplatz or The Human Condition, both of which are 10+ hours long! (The Laserdisc lineup is more managable, at only 305 titles.)
- One of the longest film series is Zatoichi with 26 films with the original actor Shintaro Katsu, a few remakes (including the 2003 one by Takeshi Kitano), and a 100-episode-long TV series. Most of the original movies have been collected in a box set from The Criterion Collection, appropriately enough!
- Want to check out a few classic Godzilla movies? You're in luck! Toho Studios has made a whopping thirty-two full-length films featuring the Big Guy, released more-or-less continuously from 1954 to 2023 (and counting!). There are so many movies in the official Canon that fans have taken to separating the series into four distinct "eras" just to make things a bit simpler; there's the Shōwa era (1954-1975; collected by The Criterion Collection in 2019 as spine number 1000), the Heisei era (1984-1995); the Millenium era (1999-2004), and the Reiwa era (2016 onward). If you chose to watch all these movies in a marathon, it would take nearly fifty-six hours, and that's if you don't choose to sleep, eat, or go to the bathroom in between. And that's not counting Toho's twenty other kaiju films taking place in the Godzilla universe. Or the 1956 Americanized version of the original, the 1998 American version from TriStar, or the American reboot from Warner Brothers and its two sequels, and that's not even mentioning the numerous dubs and subbed versions to pick from. In total, you'll have to sit through nearly 60 movies. And if that's not enough, there are also five separate TV shows (as well as five Zone Fighter episodes where he appears as a Guest Fighter), a few dozen comic series, several novels, and over 40 video games.
- It even set a record for longest running movie series, though not the most entries.
- 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die is a book that lists exactly that many movies. The catch? It's updated every few years, meaning that there are actually 1151 entries across the editions. Please note this includes the entirety of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the entire Toy Story series as one entry, the first two films in The Godfather trilogy, and Les Vampires, which is nearly seven hours long. If you want to see them all, good luck.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe
- The MCU reached this point somewhere around 2016. As of August 2023, there are currently 32 films (tied with Godzilla above and poised to overtake him in November 2023).
- All those movies, which clock in at a length of about 57 hours, would already be enough to make the franchise to qualify for this trope. But when you factor in the TV side of things, things get ridiculous, with multiple different series across 5 different channels and streaming services. On ABC, there's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (running for 7 seasons with 136 episodes total, as well as an online tie-in miniseries, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Slingshot, which contains 6 episodes), Agent Carter (2 seasons with 18 episodes), and Inhumans (one season of eight episodes; you can probably skip this one unless you're a completionist). As for the Netflix shows, there’s Daredevil (2015), Jessica Jones (2015) (both running for 3 seasons with 39 episodes), Luke Cage (2016) (2 seasons with 26 episodes), Iron Fist (2017) (2 seasons with 23 episodes), The Punisher (2017) (another 2 seasons with 26 episodes), and The Defenders (2017) (8-episode miniseries). All in all, that makes for a grand total of 392 individual installments once you include Cloak & Dagger (2018) on Freeform (2 seasons with 20 episodes), Runaways (2017) on Hulu (3 seasons with 33 episodes), and if you're a true completionist, the single ten-episode season of Helstrom note , also on Hulu. And that's just the stuff produced by Marvel Television. There's now the matter of the Disney+ shows produced by Marvel Studios themselves, which are essential viewing for the movies starting with Phase 4. There's already four D+ shows out (WandaVision with 9 episodes, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier with 6 episodes, Loki with 6 episodes and counting, and What If…? with 9 episodes and counting), with many more series planned in the next two years alone.
- Fans have meticulously catalogued all entries in the MCU, which includes the five Marvel One-Shots shorts, in-universe material like news reports from sources like WHIH World News and TheDailyBugle.net, promotions for various things ranging from the 1974 Stark Expo to Wakandan tourism, & Stylistic Suck material like “Rappin' with Captain America” and “I Want Your Cray Cray”, and even non-canon material like Team Thor and several promotional commercials with brands ranging from Burger King to Audi. As of November 2021, the chronological list has 587 unique entries, and they estimate that catching up with the entire MCU would take over 18 days of continuous watching. You'll probably have to include the tie-in comics (21 stories across 43 physical and digital issues not counting the adaptaions of the movies themselves, 33 stories and 72 issues counting them) in your archive binge for this one, merely to avoid ruining your eyesight.
- The Columbia short subject comedies: 526 shorts released, including 190 with The Three Stooges.
- Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz is reportedly the longest movie ever made with an actual plot as it would take fifteen hours to watch. It was originally a Mini Series, but they decided to put all the episodes together in theaters as one massive movie.
- There's about a dozen or so movies even longer than "Berlin Alexanderplatz", but all of them are experimental films. The current record holder is "Logistics" which takes 857 hours to watch (or over 35 days). It follows the complete process of making and selling a pedometer in reverse chronological order.
- The most entries in any film series belongs to the Wong Fei-hung franchise, which consists of a massive 89 entries.
- The "Witchcraft" series of films have the highest Numbered Sequels of any movie franchise ever, going up to 16. Obscurus Lupa was brave enough to see them all.
- Leonard Maltin's classic movie guide (and his original before making two books) features him reviewing and listing every entry in a huge film series. The most installments of any in his book are the Bowery Boys films, which go up to 47. And that's not even counting their predecessors, the Dead End Kids, the Little Tough Guys, and the East Side Kids. All of those movies combined adds up to a massive ninety-two films.
- Friday the 13th most likely has the most Numbered Sequels of any mainstream film series released in theaters going up to eight. And then they Stopped Numbering Sequels and including the reboot, would add up to 12 films. In movies, Jason Voorhees is simply the poster child for Joker Immunity.
- The Hopalong Cassidy films had a massive 66 entries going from 1938 to 1948, a rate of about six made per year.
- The Carry On films are listed by the IMDb as going up to thirty-one parts, the highest number of any keyword with a numbered part.
- The original black and white Charlie Chan films contain an impressive 41 installments.
