UltimateMovieRankings (UMR) has been ranking movies since 2011. Movies are ranked by using a combination of box office grosses, reviews, and awards. So far we have ranked 36,000 movies, written over 8,500 pages, been viewed over 25 million times, won three website awards, and have received over 50,000 comments on our pages.
Our vital links: Site Index, Newest Pages & Request Hotline. The Trending Now Sidebar lists our most popular pages in the last 24 hours.
Our Site Index lets you see what movie subjects we have already written about. The index lists the movie subjects alphabetically. Subjects go from classic performers like Clark Gable and Charlie Chaplin to the stars of the 1960s like Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman to today’s most popular stars like Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum and Chris Pratt.
We like ranking movies…and that is what this website is all about. And we are not talking about a Top Ten list…we are talking about ranking all the movies in somebody’s career from Best to Worst. The criteria used for the rankings is box office grosses, critic reviews, audience voting, and award recognition. Every day the amount of movies ranked by Ultimate Movie Rankings increases ….our tally is now over 25,000 movies. The number one ranked movie is The Godfather ….coming in last is Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas. Thankfully our pages have been well received. Recently we crossed the 15 million view mark and are now read in over 230 different countries.
How we got here.
Sometime in 2010, for the millionth time I was looking at Joel Hirschhorn’s book Rating The Movie Stars (1983) when I wondered had he updated his ratings lately? A quick internet check provided the sad news that Mr. Hirchhorn had passed away in 2005. About a month later, I thought I could update the ratings. I then came up with an idea to create a mathematical equation that would create a numerical score for each movie. The first thing I had to come up with were factors for the equation.
So I thought….if I were producing a movie, what would I like to see my movie accomplish. The first thing I would want would be for the movie to be successful at the box office. Secondly, I would like the critics and moviegoers to enjoy my movie. And finally, I would like my movie to receive award recognition through Golden Globe® and Oscar® ceremonies.
There are all kinds of ways to determine if you want to see or skip a movie. You can depend on your favorite critic. My favorites are the late great Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin. You might go to Rotten Tomatoes to get the consensus of all the critics. You might watch the viewer ratings at Yahoo Movies and IMDB. You might depend on which movies are doing the best at the box office. You might wait for the end of the year awards.
Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score takes all of these options and creates a mathematical equation that generates a score from 1 to 100. The higher the score the better the movie. A “good ” movie score = 60 or above. So anything above 60 should be a good movie to check out. This gives a good comparison number between centuries and now my wife and I can argue over the merits of her favorite, The Sound of Music and one of my favorites, Pulp Fiction using the same scoring criteria.
So far, I’ve generated scores for 36,000+ movies. With these scores, I’ve written 1,000+ web pages with a focus on actors/actresses and similar groups (Star Trek vs Star Wars, Top 100 Sports Movies are examples).
So let’s look at the breakdown of the variables in the equation.
1. Box office results. Receives the second-highest percentage (30%) of the equation. The ceiling was 200 million in adjusted for inflation dollars. Any movie that crossed 200 million maxed out the points in the category.
2. Critics and audience reception. Receives the highest percentage (46%) of the equation. So where do I find critics/audience reception? I use many different sources: RottenTomatoes, IMDb, MetaCritic, Yahoo Movies, Roger Ebert, Leonard Maltin, and Fandango. Put them all together and I get an average with 100% being the highest score possible. Sadly with the passing of my all-time favorite critic, Roger Ebert, I needed a new source….after much research…..our latest movie critic and taking Mr. Ebert’s spot is YouTube movie reviewer Chris Stuckmann.
3. Award Recognition. The final part of the equation is worth 24%. A movie gets points for Golden Globe® and Oscar® nominations and wins. The Golden Globes get 5% while the Oscars® get 13% of the equation. The last 6% goes to the amount of Oscar® nominations and the amount of Oscar® wins.
One way to see how the scores are calculated:
Top 200 Box Office Hits with Inflation + Top 100 Best Reviewed Movies + 88 Best Picture Oscar Winners = Top 100 UMR Score Movies
In January of 2011, we published our first Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score table on HubPages.com…we picked one of our favorite actors, Bruce Willis, to be the guinea pig. We have updated his page countless times over the years.
1 Many economists and statisticians have reservations about the Ticket Inflation Method [TIM] for measuring inflation of movie earnings and here are a few of their main ones
2 TIM in effect presupposes that a film of yesteryear is issued today at current ticket prices and that it will be seen by the same number of people who saw it in its day, but of course by and large that is in reality never going to happen.
3 The cinema of the so called Golden Era of Hollywood faced nowhere near the same competition as today’s cinema does from TV and other mediums and when TV entered the equation cinema audiences took a hit.
4 However more importantly added to this is the following consideration. From for example the year 1943 until today ticket prices at the movies have inflated at roughly twice the rate of general inflation.
5 Gary Cooper’s 1943 For Whom the Bell Tolls is an example of this. The 1943 Annual Review lists an actual domestic gross of $15.1 million for that film which under TIM converts to some $450 million.
6 However a consultation with the Consumer Price Index of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics [CPI] suggests that 1943’s $15.1 would buy on average goods and services to the value of approx. $220 million in today’s markets. Still a substantial sum but less than half the figure calculated under TIM.
7 The wide disparity between ticket price inflation and general inflation was prevalent throughout the classic era to one degree or another. The classic era is said to have ended in 1962 and even as late as then TIM gives us an adjusted domestic gross of about $375 against an actual figure of $31.3 for the Duke’s ensemble picture The Longest Day whereas CPI shows that $31.3 would be valued at just t around $260 million today – i.e. the gap had narrowed but was still considerable.
8 In short cinema admissions in the Classic era were in real terms up to more than half as cheap as they are today and usually if you sell something at a “cut price” it will find more takers [especially if competition is limited].
9 In short for Cooper’s For Whom the Bell Tolls to earn in REAL TERMS today the $450 million credited to it by TIM it would have had to either (a) attracted twice the audience it did back in 1943 or (b) charged double the ticket prices that it did and still had the same audience magnitude.
10 Some economists however seem to think that audiences in classic era years would not in the same numbers have paid in real terms the cinema admission prices that we pay today and indeed it is feared that many of them probably couldn’t have afforded to
11 That is why under the “Formula Method” Ticket Price inflation IS taken into account but is modified by the formula which includes population sizes, competition from other mediums and activities, no of cinemas in existence, no of screens used and something called “per capita adjustments” though I forget exactly what that is. Burt Lancaster’s Airport (1970) converts to nearly a billion in domestic gross under the Formula Method whereas TIM give it a figure of $600 million roughly.
12 Put simply those with questions about TIM and even the Formula Method are concerned that those methods are too hypothetical for practical use and some statisticians and sites such as Wiki therefore favor using CPI as its enthusiasts claim that it is less hypothetical in that it does tell us what an actual gross in 1943 would realistically most likely buy on average in today’s general consumer markets.
13 However yet others will have “NONE of the above” because they argue that things change so much and so fast over decades that it is unrealistic to try to relate the marketplaces of many years ago to those of today.
14 How [they ask] do you compare Moore nee Willis, Arnie, the Skywalkers and the Hans Solos who are buttressed nowadays with great special effects and modern sound techniques and often benefit from self-selling franchises with little Charlie in the silent era who had just a stick, bowler hat and a custard pie as props?” [Bond, Star Wars and Star Trek for example seem to do well whoever are the stars.]
15 The awful, wooden Sylvester Stallone’s career is substantially built round a handful of franchises and outside of those his film’s earnings overall are poor and his table on this site records a large number of flops. Total adjusted domestic gross in Cogerson for 16 franchise films on Stallone’s table is approx. $3.3 billion. Total for his 33 other films is around $1.6 billion, average of $49 million roughly.
16 Indeed Box Office Mojo does not credit to Sly (1) Staying Alive as whilst he directed/co-wrote that one he is an uncredited “Man on Street” as an actor (2) and (3) Antz and Zookeeper as his contributions to those were seen as undeserving a grosses credit and anyway his roles were voice only [so one does not see him with or without plastic surgery! – see below.]
17 Taking those 3 movies away from his Cogerson totals as well leaves him with 30 films totaling roughly $1.15 billion or an average of $38 million per movie. Even crediting Sly with Split would not save that record!
18 One critic opined that “apart from possibly Jason Statham Mr. Stallone is maybe the worst actor among all the action stars despite massive hype rewarding him with a few Oscar nominations.”
19 Amusingly there were plans in 1981 for the 35 year Stallone to get a bit of plastic surgery and play Stanley in a big screen Streetcar remake and indeed a younger looking Stallone was suddenly spotted going about in public !!
20 However the project was aborted when Tennessee Williams openly warned the producers that Sly would make a fool of himself as he wasn’t an exceptional actor and it would take such an actor to reach the yardstick set by Brando who was just approx. 22 when he first played Stanley on stage and roughly 26 when he played him on screen.
21 In other words whilst Brando won an Oscar nom for his screen Stanley it is clear that Tennessee didn’t see the overblown mountebank Sly as genuine Oscar nom material and Sylvester is said to have bitterly resented Williams’ intervention.
22 Conversely I should add that I have always been full of praise for Moore nee Willis’ divergence at times from his action man roles and especially admired him in 6th Sense, Pulp Fiction and Nobody’s Fool. He was also very funny in his guest appearances in the TV comedy sitcom Friends whereas Sly teaming up with the Muppets was simply an embarrassment.
23 Also the great Bing Crosby said before his own death in 1977 that he probably would not have “made it” in the later eras of his life. Perhaps the writer L P Hartley expressed it best in the first line of his novel The Go Between “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”
Hey Bob……wow…..there is enough information on this comment for an entire UMR page. Which makes me think…..if you want to have your own page on this subject…..we can put this comment….and anything else on the subject into a your very own UMR page. It will of course have a byline….of written by….let me know.
As for the comment…..lots of great information…I understand it…..but I still like reporting the grosses….versus it’s CPI worth. Let me know about the idea for your very own UMR page.
HI BRUCE
1 That’s a generous offer and it appeals to me.
2 I promise not to put Superman Returns comments in it if you will keep Joel out of it.
3 However I can’t promise not to attempt to pull your leg about other matters as I never like things to get TOO serious. Also “Winding up” is an old Belfast Shipyard trait with one usual caveat – you have to find the person at whom you are aiming your playful jibes interesting though I maybe shouldn’t have said that as you could maybe try to use it against me within a Joel context!
Hi Bob,
I agree with Bruce, your week-end essay contains a wealth of interesting information with respect to the different methods of comparing the commercial success of movies across generations (though there is towards the end what seems to be a divergence with your critique of Sylvester Stallone – which by the way I also agree with).
The formula method is certainly an interesting concept though there seems to be many factors which would require subjective judgment with respect to the relative importance or weighting one would need give these factors, possibly rendering the results too hypothetical. However, I suppose that if one is interested to compare the commercial success of films across various eras taking into account the socio-economic context of the era in which they were made, then either the formula method or the CPI method probably makes sense. But if one is interested in getting an indication of how many people actually went to see these movies, whether made in 1943, 1972, or 2014, then the ticket inflation method seems more appropriate. So I go back to a previous argument I made on this issue: it depends what you wan to know.
In any event, a remake of Streetcar with Stallone as Stanley would likely have been a commercial failure, whichever method one uses to calculate success 😉
Hey PhilHoF17….glad you agree that there is some gold in these Bob CPI comments…..Bob and I will have to figure out a way to get this done. “So I go back to a previous argument I made on this issue: it depends what you wan to know”….I agree with this comment 100%. I think if Stallone had played Rocky playing Stanley it could have been a hit……instead of saying Adrian……he could easily say Stella….lol. Good feedback.
1 Thanks to both of you for commenting on my own albeit tentative and amateur stats exercises. I completely agree with Phil’s comments in his 2nd para as Bruce’s TIM is the best way to compare actual statistical popularity of movies across the decades and CPI should give us some idea of changing monetary values over long periods.
2 Whatever its merits the Formula method, whilst a stats whizz kid like our own Work Horse could probably apply it easily enough if he was interested, it is much too convoluted for a statistical “layman” like me.
3 True one is given the formula itself and the tables for the various components over the decades – population, ticket price changes, per capita quotations etc – and I took a small sample of movies from each decade just to see the outcome and as said the 70s seem to win out [with Godpop and Airport for example reaching nearly a billion in adjusted domestic gross whereas Bing’s 30s/40s decades were among ones that took a huge hit.]
4 However consulting the various tables and applying the results was time-consuming and it took me about 20 minutes to calculate the adjusted gross of just any one movie. While Bruce’s TIM and the CPI method are satisfactorily informative, certainly for my own purposes, they are also great fun and that’s what a good part of it is all about. Put another way I doubt if we will ever see our Stevie doing many calculations by the Formula method!
5 I can see where Phil might think the Sly stuff was a digression but I regard it as completely within context of my overall post [the difficulties at times in comparing the present with the past] as it showed that in the modern era Stallone’s career has been built around a small number of franchises to a great extent which did not exist in the classic era but that Mr Demi Moore not only reached beyond the Die Hard movies and action genre generally at times but was very funny in comedy which was the whole rage in the 1930s/40s Hollywood and helped make great stars of practitioners like Cary Grant and even the droll Bill Powell.
6 I should have maybe added for further balance that Richard Harris was adamant that Brando whilst a great dramatic actor “simply could not do comedy” and I concur with Harris. Marlon’s Sakini in Teahouse of the August Moon was clever enough but to me not funny whilst I thought my Glenn’s hapless Capt Fisby was a very humorous portrayal in that movie and other comic actors like Paul Ford were equally at home in the flick.
7 However I refuse to come down on one side in the debate between you two about whether Sly’s Stanley would have been box office because regarding any effort on his part to emulate the Great Mumbler I simply will not go there
8 I do though think that Sylvester IS an awful dramatic actor. They used to say about Victor Mature that he had two expressions – the expansive grin and the deep frown. If Sly possesses even those qualities I personally have never seen him exhibit them [Sorry Sly but maybe there’s a Joel in all of us itching to get out! ] However Stallone and Mature suited what they did I thought and I actually enjoyed Vic’s action movies and Stallone’s Rocky/Rambo outings though I think the extensive franchises ultimately made them boring in Sly’s case.
9 Let us not forget though that according to one television wit the macho men like Stallone, Mature and The Duke probably “dug with their bare hands the Panama Canal” for the American people! Anyway great points and pungent arguments from both of you.
Hey Bob……good comment at 8:15 AM on February 28th. Your points are interesting….and for the most part I agree. Thanks for sharing those thoughts.
You can write it….and we will edit and add some pictures to it…..and give you full credit for it. So get to work….lol.
It’s snowing here in Manchester. A cold blast of wind all the way from Russia is causing mayhem in Britain. Hundreds of schools are closed. Damn those Russkies…
Where were we? Oh yes Stallone… I thought he was pretty good in those action movies and in the early Rocky movies. A better actor than Arnie and Dwayne Johnson for sure. And let’s not forget he was Oscar nominated twice for playing Rocky Balboa.
How many other actors have been Oscar nominated more than once for playing the same character? [cue head scratching] 😉
Hey Steve….Al Pacino did it before Stallone….he got a Best Supporting Actor nom for playing Michael in The Godfather…and a Best Actor nom for playing Michael in The Godfather Part 2.
Snowing in Manchester….lucky for us…..it looks like winter has ended……was actually on out the golf course last weekend. Enjoy your snow.
And I think Paul Newman did it too?
I hate snow!
Hi everybody,
Here is th new publication of the american box office for 1926.
http://www.boxofficestory.com/box-office-usa-1926-top-21-a-30-a137298760
Hi Bruce,
Good reading :
http://www.boxofficestory.com/box-office-usa-1926-top-11-a-20-a136337296
Hey Laurent….I agree 100% this is indeed a great read. Thanks for sharing…and I highly recommend it…….one day our efforts will connect….and we will have almost 60 years of box office numbers.
So….I have a question…..been working on a second Family Feud game…and I am making avatars for the players….who would be the actor that best represents you?
Hey Bruce,
Love the idea ! I am a big fan of the duke, but I think James Stewart or Dustin Hoffman would be more accurate to represent me.
Thanks for your kind comment.
Hey Laurent…thanks for the suggestion….probably going to work on that this weekend. Hope you can defend your title…lol.
HI BRUCE
1 All’s well that ends well as the post to Steve DID finally go through and stayed put..
2 Thanks for trying to check out the matter anyway and for the Sir Maurice link. I had already apologised to you for my overlooking your listing of Sleuth in your Sir M top films.
Hey Bob…..glad that issue does not pop up on a regular basis. No problem about Sleuth…which is one of WoC’s favorite Caine movies. Caine will be back in theaters three times this year…so glad more Caine movies are coming.
HI BRUCE:
1 Glad W o C likes Sleuth. It was a modest commercial hit but nowhere near some of the other high quality flicks of 1972 with for example you charts giving it an $88 million adjusted domestic gross compared with Godpop’s $700 million.
2 You may recall that In Sleuth Olivier wanted to kill Sir Maurice not because the latter had cheated with Larry’s wife but because Sir M had laughed at writer Olivier’s fictitious Great Detective, Sinjin Lord Merridew. It often occurs to me that at times you might wish you could put out my lights for sneering at your Great Critic! You are of course refreshingly very diplomatic in handling opinions that conflict with your own, and Steve too seems like Mr Nice Guy, though I also liked and miss the confrontational styles of John and Flora.
COGERSON HELP LINE!
A short time ago I tried to post comments on Steve’s Cooper video but some message came up about Flora’s friends the Spammers. Luckily I always keep a complete copy of any post for a few days so it was no problem to resubmit the Cooper one and for now at least it seems to have gone through. Anything you picked up at your end about the mystery?
Hey Bob…..not sure what the error was….normally the only issue is when two people post a comment at the same exact time. All the spam is normally contained in a behind spot….with only a few escaping into the website. My spam blocker has caught over 400,000 spam comments.