Roblox Jumps To #1 With A Perfect 100 In Fandom's 2025 Franchise Factor Score

Gaming Dominates the Overall Rankings as UGC and Creator-Driven Worlds Surge

San Francisco, CA - December 16, 2025 – Today, Fandom, the world’s largest entertainment and gaming fan platform, announced its list of the top franchises of 2025, with Roblox taking the #1 overall spot — a major leap from its #10 ranking in 2024 and a clear signal of the explosive momentum behind creator-driven, youth-focused worlds. Gaming once again dominated the Franchise Factor landscape, capturing the majority of top positions across categories as players continued to gravitate toward expansive, participatory universes. In film and television, established heavyweights like Star Wars and Marvel held strong thanks to new installments and world-building extensions, while anime surged this year, with 70% of the top 10 anime franchises driven by new seasons, anniversaries, or major theatrical releases that fueled fan engagement.

The results highlight three key trends in fan engagement:

• The Dominance of Creator Platforms & Youth Focus

• The Power of Finality and Major Series Conclusions

• Consistency Over Peaks: The "Always On" Strategy

The Franchise Factor Score is a weighted calculation against five criteria: Worldbuilding, High Critical and Fan Ratings, Fierce Fanbase, Cultural Relevance, and Consistency. These insights were analyzed and validated through Fandom’s robust proprietary first-party data — more than 350 million monthly unique visitors and 50 million pages of content across 250,000 wiki communities. This methodology provides a 360-degree view of franchises and fan interest across the entertainment and gaming landscape through the eyes of Fandom.

Based on Fandom’s 2025 Franchise Factor Score, here are the complete rankings:

Top 20 Overall Franchises of 2025

Key Findings:

• Roblox reaching #1 overall shows that fans are gravitating toward ecosystems powered by user-generated content rather than single releases. Continuous updates, creator tools, and community-built experiences now drive more engagement than traditional launch cycles.

• Small but highly active Roblox titles like Dandy’s World and Grow a Garden outperformed major franchises such as Minecraft and Disney, proving that consistent in-game events and tightly engaged niche communities can generate bigger momentum than scale alone.

• And it’s not just gaming that dominated this year. YouTube-based animated series Battle for Dream Island scored on par with global giants like Pokémon, Squid Game (TV List - #5), and Animal Jam, demonstrating how massive fandoms are being built entirely outside of traditional Hollywood pipelines.

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• The "Always On" Strategy is vital for established franchises as regular content drops and creative output were the key to maintaining a high score. Dungeons & Dragons (#14) provided a steady stream of content, including the final core rulebook release and the constant release of new adventure books. Cookie Run Kingdom #15 ranked due to a continuous, high-impact drip-feed of updates which is critical for mobile/gacha franchises to maintain fan interest.

  Top 10 Gaming Franchises of 2025

  

  Key Findings:

  • Creator-driven ecosystems led the charge, with Roblox and two Roblox-native franchises landing in the top three. This continues a trend where UGC worlds rival (and often beat) traditional legacy brands.

  • 50% of this year’s Top 10 gaming franchises released meaningful updates, events, or expansions within the year, underscoring that steady content drops remain the strongest predictor of sustained fan interest.

  
  

  Top 10 Anime Franchises of 2025

  

  Key Findings:

  • 70% of the top 10 launched new seasons, films, or anniversary projects this year.

  • Fans showed the strongest engagement when franchises offered fresh story arcs or expanded canon.

  • Theatrical releases and milestone celebrations were major traffic accelerators on Fandom users.

  • The growth engine of 2025 starts on digital comic platforms, and the Anime industry serves as the essential rocket fuel for global expansion.

Top 10 Movie Franchises of 2025

Key Findings:

• Familiar universes still dominate because they’re delivering big new installments.

  • The top of the movie list is filled with franchises that had or will soon have major releases: Captain America: Brave New World and Fantastic Four from Marvel, and the upcoming Star Wars film, The Mandalorian & Grogu. Fans continue to rally around long-running worlds when the pipeline is full, and 2025 delivered some of the biggest title drops in years.

• Even without a 2025 movie premiere, franchises like Star Wars (#2), Harry Potter (#6), and Super Mario (#9) surged in ranking thanks to world-building television series, game releases, trailer releases, early looks, casting announcements, and landmark anniversary celebrations. Fans increasingly engage during the buildup phase—meaning hype cycles, not just releases, are key to franchise momentum.

• Franchises like Sonic (#5), Harry Potter (#6), Lilo & Stitch (#7), Lego (#8), and Jurassic Park (#10), continue to rank because of live-action remakes, TV extensions, and new film announcements. Cross-platform expansions keep these worlds culturally relevant regardless of whether they have a tentpole movie in theaters this year.

Top 10 TV Franchises of 2025

Key Findings:

• Franchises that hit milestone finales rose to the top, driven by fans heavily invested in seeing long-running stories reach a conclusion. Star Wars saw the series Andor come to an epic finish, driving it to #2. The final episodes of popular series Squid Game (#5) and the premiere of the concluding season of Stranger Things (#8) drove these franchises up to record high FFS numbers.

• Shows like SpongeBob SquarePants (#6), Power Rangers (#7), Thomas the Tank Engine (#10), and even Battle for Dream Island (#4) climbed the rankings through anniversary events, new seasons, marathons, and streaming extensions. Whether animated classics or YouTube-born series, familiar titles stayed relevant by refreshing content for both returning and newly discovering audiences.

Fastest Growing Franchises of 2025

Key Findings:

• A massive portion of the fastest-growing franchises are rooted in Webtoon and Manga, demonstrating that this format is the primary incubator for new, high-growth IP.

  • #2 Miside (982.16% Growth) saw massive growth driven by a pivotal chapter release in the original webtoon, showing the core audience's power.

  • #3 Disastrous Necromancer (285.42% Growth) Season 2 premiered on the streaming format Webtoon, which fueled massive readership increases.

• The high-growth list validates the non-traditional nature of the market, specifically showing that Roblox is not just dominant overall but is also the source of the year's most explosive, single-IP growth.

• For traditional media to appear on this growth list, it needs a release that is either critically acclaimed or highly anticipated, and often targeted at a niche audience.