About a year ago I started entering movies into a spreadsheet with various information about them (year, run time) as well as ratings from critics and audiences at RottenTomatoes, MetaCritic, Amazon, and IMDb.
I created a formula for scoring the movies based on those ratings according to criteria that make sense to me. The ratings at some sites are bunched more closely together than at others, so I converted them all into standard deviations from each site's mean. I give more weight to ratings scores than to up-or-down votes, and more weight to audience scores than to critics' scores. The main Rotten Tomatoes score that people commonly cite is the percentage of positive up-or-down votes by critics, which I believe is the most overrated metric, and I give it the least weight.
I give more weight to movies that have a larger number of reviews since (a) it's easy to get 100% favorability on five reviews, and (b) more reviews generally means more social relevance, which counts for something in its own right. I slightly downgrade movies for being foreign, or for being documentaries, or for being animated, because in my view those movies tend to be slightly overrated by critics and audience members who think they should like such movies more than they really do. (I do not double-count the downgrade for movies that fit into more than one of those categories.)
I didn't have a clear reason for doing this. I just started because I was curious about how various classic movies stacked up against each other when different types of ratings (critics vs. audiences) were taken into account. Then I started looking at various "top N movies of all time" lists and adding whatever was there, then adding based on whatever I could think of ("let's check out all of John Wayne's movies," etc.). It became about a twenty-minutes-a-day habit -- searching for movies and adding them if they seemed promising. At this point I've got 1,084 (edit: now 1,685) movies in my database. I'm pretty confident that I'm not missing many (if at all) that should legitimately be in the top 300 or so. I don't think I'm missing many that should be in the top 500. Beyond around 600, I'm still missing a bunch -- probably at least 100. So the movies numbered 900 and beyond are probably not really in the true top 1000; they are waiting to be displaced.
Here's my list.
Right now, it's just a bare-bones list. Eventually, I'll include more info in a sortable table and make it more interactive.
In any case, I'm posting them here because (a) why not?, and (b) if you think I'm missing a movie, please post it in this thread and I'll add it to my spreadsheet and update the list. (I might already have it in my spreadsheet outside the top thousand, but either way, I'll let you know how it scores.) Feel free to argue about how the order is all wrong. Obviously, liking versus disliking a movie is subjective; and choosing how much weight to give one category of scores over another category (e.g., critics on MetaCritic versus audiences at IMDB) is also subjective. I think the formula I'm using has generally produced reasonable results, but I'm open to contrary arguments.
I created a formula for scoring the movies based on those ratings according to criteria that make sense to me. The ratings at some sites are bunched more closely together than at others, so I converted them all into standard deviations from each site's mean. I give more weight to ratings scores than to up-or-down votes, and more weight to audience scores than to critics' scores. The main Rotten Tomatoes score that people commonly cite is the percentage of positive up-or-down votes by critics, which I believe is the most overrated metric, and I give it the least weight.
I give more weight to movies that have a larger number of reviews since (a) it's easy to get 100% favorability on five reviews, and (b) more reviews generally means more social relevance, which counts for something in its own right. I slightly downgrade movies for being foreign, or for being documentaries, or for being animated, because in my view those movies tend to be slightly overrated by critics and audience members who think they should like such movies more than they really do. (I do not double-count the downgrade for movies that fit into more than one of those categories.)
I didn't have a clear reason for doing this. I just started because I was curious about how various classic movies stacked up against each other when different types of ratings (critics vs. audiences) were taken into account. Then I started looking at various "top N movies of all time" lists and adding whatever was there, then adding based on whatever I could think of ("let's check out all of John Wayne's movies," etc.). It became about a twenty-minutes-a-day habit -- searching for movies and adding them if they seemed promising. At this point I've got 1,084 (edit: now 1,685) movies in my database. I'm pretty confident that I'm not missing many (if at all) that should legitimately be in the top 300 or so. I don't think I'm missing many that should be in the top 500. Beyond around 600, I'm still missing a bunch -- probably at least 100. So the movies numbered 900 and beyond are probably not really in the true top 1000; they are waiting to be displaced.
Here's my list.
Right now, it's just a bare-bones list. Eventually, I'll include more info in a sortable table and make it more interactive.
In any case, I'm posting them here because (a) why not?, and (b) if you think I'm missing a movie, please post it in this thread and I'll add it to my spreadsheet and update the list. (I might already have it in my spreadsheet outside the top thousand, but either way, I'll let you know how it scores.) Feel free to argue about how the order is all wrong. Obviously, liking versus disliking a movie is subjective; and choosing how much weight to give one category of scores over another category (e.g., critics on MetaCritic versus audiences at IMDB) is also subjective. I think the formula I'm using has generally produced reasonable results, but I'm open to contrary arguments.
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