In my last blog post I examined the best decades in music according to Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”. I got some good feedback on this project so I decided to use a similar formula and examine the best decades for movies based on IMDb’s Top 250 movies list and Rotten Tomatoes Top 100 movies list.

I have always been a fan of movies. Before deciding to start a blog on data I fooled around with a short lived blog about movies only realizing after that the time I spent writing about movies could be used to watch more movies so I shut the project down. Now everyone has their own argument for which decade produced the best films. Whether it is the German Expressionist Movement, Japan’s Golden Age, Neorealism, Soviet Montage, or French New Wave, every decade of film has furthered the art form immensely. So instead of sitting at a table and debating I decided to examine the data and find tangible evidence. I decided to examine both IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes because, although IMDb has a great Top 250 list, anyone can rate the movie leaving some things up to pure emotion. Like in 2009 when The Dark Knight Faced off against Godfather I and fans of each movie emotional destroyed the other with 1 star votes (if you want to learn more you can read about that controversy here). So I decided it would be a good idea to bring in Rotten Tomatoes list which has a very strict algorithm for rating their movies and accounting for variations in number of reviews. So, after reviewing each list here is what I found:

What I initially found with this was that the graph had a mild negative skew, with more popular movies being made after 1970. However, as I examined it closely, there was a lot of Rotten Tomatoe’s top 100 movies present before 1970 but they were hidden amongst the extra 150 movies from IMDb’s Top 250. I decided that I should break it down even more to get a better visualization of the data:

After taking only the top 100 movies from IMDb’s list and grouping the years into decades, we get a clearer picture of which decades the best movies came from in each list. The IMDb data still follows a negative skew. IMDb users who vote seem to prefer more recent movies that have been released in the past 20 years. Rotten Tomatoes, on the other hand, is positively skewed and slightly bimodal. Rotten Tomatoes critics seem to prefer movies from the 50’s (Singin’ in the Rain, Rear Window, North by Northwest, and Sunset Boulevard are all in top 25 of Rotten Tomatoes list). They also seem to prefer movies that have been released in the past 5 years (ex. Boyhood, Inside Out, Before Midnight). The biggest disconnect between these two lists comes in nineties and the two-thousands. Rotten Tomatoes’ list only had 4 movies from 1990-1999 present on their list whereas IMDb had a whopping 24 movies. Almost 25% of IMDb’s top 100 comes from movies realized in the nineties. So I decided to break it down once again and use some DOUGHNUT CHARTS!!

Different Type of Doughnuts but if you like data like I do then I assume you’re making this face regardless!

Here is a breakdown of Rotten Tomatoes’ Top 100 list with percentages by decade. This shows us similar results to what we observed with the bar graph comparison. Almost 1/5 of the movies present on the list were released between 1950 and 1959 while just under 7% of the movies on the list were released between 1980 and 1999.

I found this chart and the comparison to RT’s Top 100 extremely interesting. There is a massive shift in preference on the IMDb page to movies released between 1980 and 1999. Almost half of the movies on IMDb’s list appear between those two decades (45%). Furthermore, Rotten Tomatoes’ largest category (1950-1959) which held 19.8% of movies on the list is cut in half for IMDb’s list in which only 10% of their movies are from 1950-1959. Lastly, 58.41% of movies on Rotten Tomatoes’ list were released before 1970, only 29% of movies on IMDb’s list were released before 1970.

Now, here is my best educated guess for a THIRD VARIABLE (wow two posts in a row where I get to use the name of the site I love it). IMDd was published online on October 17, 1990. This means that movies from the 80’s were still extremely popular, while movies from the 1990’s could be rated as they came out by the GENERAL PUBLIC. Rotten Tomatoes, on the other hand, was created in 1998 and uses reviews by critics to develop their Top Lists. The general public (however informed or uninformed they are about movies) could not influence the general ranking of movies on Rotten Tomatoes lists leaving those movies up to the interpretation of critics who review movies for a living. Rotten Tomatoes’ rankings couldn’t be spoiled by some Joe Schmo in his basement who gave Rear Window a 1 out of 10 stars because “nobody in a neighborhood would keep their windows open for that long during the day” (that’s a quotation from an actual review on IMDb).

If anything I think this is another reminder to take every piece of data we find with a grain of salt. Or, as Einstein (or Five Finger Death Punch) would say, “Question Everything” (never thought I would put Einstein and FFDP in the same sentence…).

P.S.D

Here’s your post script data for the day! A breakdown of IMDb’s Top 250 list in a Doughnut Chart!