What could be better than a list of the greatest 1,000 films of all time? A list of the top 5,000 films of all time. Its value, obviously, will be rather dependent on how you use lists. It is less likely to be a generator for recommendations as the 1,000 list (unless you adhere to the broad filters of decade, genre, etc. that Letterboxd creates). More likely, I expect, it will be seen as a very general marker for how far along the most voracious viewers are in their journey to watch everything worth watching. You may like to peruse rankings by Decade below:
| -1929 | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s…
What could be better than a list of the greatest 1,000 films of all time? A list of the top 5,000 films of all time. Its value, obviously, will be rather dependent on how you use lists. It is less likely to be a generator for recommendations as the 1,000 list (unless you adhere to the broad filters of decade, genre, etc. that Letterboxd creates). More likely, I expect, it will be seen as a very general marker for how far along the most voracious viewers are in their journey to watch everything worth watching. You may like to peruse rankings by Decade below:
| -1929 | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s |
I started with a list of about 30k titles gleaned from many Letterboxd lists, IMDb data, and other sources and crunched the numbers. I limited the list to those with 2,500 IMDb votes. Votes were normalized against the maximum votes on that website to account for the differing traffic, so the Highest Voted movie would be a 1.00 and the lowest 0.01. I weighted the differing website rating according to my own sense of importance with Letterboxd about 10x Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic about half of IMDb. I also included weighting by year to account for the significant recency bias in online vote tallies. That weight was Votes x (1+((2000-Year)/100). While that was sufficiently effective for the 1,000 list, as you can see by the year/decade numbers below, 5,000 let them all back in.
Most Frequent:
Year
2004 ... 92
2019 ... 89
1999 ... 82
2012 ... 81
1993 ... 79
Year Adj
1964 ... 54
1962 ... 51
1940 ... 30
1939 ... 29
1960 ... 44
1948 ... 33
1941 ... 26
1963 ... 43
1931 ... 18
1971 ... 49
Decade
2010s ... 743
2000s ... 725
1990s ... 686
1970s ... 558
1960s ... 540
1980s ... 510
Director
32 ... Alfred Hitchcock
30 ... Ingmar Bergman
26 ... Akira Kurosawa
26 ... Fritz Lang
26 ... John Ford
25 ... Martin Scorsese
21 ... Billy Wilder
21 ... Steven Spielberg
21 ... William Wyler
21 ... Woody Allen
Since it does not seem coincidental that the best represented years are the ones that coincide with Letterboxd's years of existence, I'm trying to figure out how to account for it. My first attempt is to see who outperforms the trendline. Even using this technique on my original formula, the top years were 2018, 2019, 2017, 2015, 2014, and 2016. However, my latest adjustment for age, in coordination with the trendline method, appears to have sufficiently quieted the 2010's noise.
