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 10,500 pages, been viewed over 50 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.
To Robert, do you have your own favs section?
Hey Spencer….Bob has his favorites for sure….luckily I have written UMR pages on most of them.
MORNIN’ BRUCE!
1 I meant to say this to you before just in passing but it’s time has now come with US Open tennis reaching its climax and US Presidential Election just around the corner. You are one of three well-informed bloggers whose sites I have been avidly following for the past 4 or 5 years and the other two are Douglas Perry who writes good stuff about tennis, and Nate Silver who runs a blog that gives detailed statistical analysis and closely considered commentary on American elections.
2 I admire all three of you because of my perception of the objective and dedicated manner in which you run your sites and impart information so that in a way you all remind me of each other in professional make-up and character, though of course I’ve never met the other two either.
3 I don’t though actually get involved in their blogs as my main passion is movies and I am a firm believer in the classical writer Matthew Arnold’s advice about not spreading your energies too thin -“One aim, one business, one desire.”
BOB
Hey Bob….thanks for the very kind words….they are greatly appreciated. I am in good company with Nate Silver and Douglas Perry. Your contributions since you have left the shadows have been greatly appreciated. It makes me wonder about other people in the shadows…and what if information they have and are not sharing…..hopefully they are observing you closely and seeing it is far better to be in the light…than the shadows…lol. Thanks again for such a great compliment.
BRUCE
1 Here are a few additional points on some of the matters we have discussed recently.
RERUNS
2 You certainly do an excellent job absorbing these into your overall inflation adjustments. The Wizard of Oz is a particularly hard movie to get right in that respect; and to be successful in the exercise one needs the type of detail that you provided for GWTW’s rolling income in your Olivia De Havilland. page.. How often though would The Man in The Street come across that?
3 Back in the Old Days we never got box office grosses published and of course there were no internet research facilities available so that all that the ordinary film-goer had going was Variety’s Top 20 rental hits.
4 However as I think you have already articulated some films did not make those lists at all because their income was split over two calendar years. Accordingly I grew up thinking that certain films were flops until Cogerson demonstrated that many of them were in fact healthy hits.
JAMES CAAN
5 Jimmy did not seem able to capitalise on Godpop to the extent that Pacino and Duval did and some journalists have suggested that the reason was that he is of a rebellious nature that has upset many Hollywood power players over the years.
SUPERMAN 1978
6 Apparently the Salkinds shot Supe 1 and 2 back-to-back and Bud had scenes in both but the Salkinds cut them out of No 2 so that they would not have to pay him further profits. To paraphrase an old cliche “They used poor Marlon then threw him away.”
SANDRA BULLOCK
7 I think her agent was saying that because Tom was historically by far the bigger box office star he had to carry the can for the flop. In short the agent was using Tom’s massive box office record against him. That might be an agent’s job in the circs but the puritanical streak in me blames Bullock for allowing her agent to be disrespectful to a fellow thespian who has been left with NOTHING to prove at the box office. Wow! Between us you and I have certainly savaged Sandra in the past few days. Will she ever recover?
OLD DAD
8 No he never got to meet Randolph or the Duke but he did have his ”moment in the sun’.
There was from Belfast a minor celeb called Ronnie Carroll who sang on the radio, secured a couple of hits in the British charts, and represented Britain in the prestigious Eurovision song contest.
9 In his pre-celebrity days as a boy he worked with dad on an industrial shop floor in Belfast and one time lost his pay-packet which old dad found and returned. Naturally during the years in which Ronnie was relatively successful dad dined out on that story. Ronnie died last year aged 81. .
BOB
BRUCE
1 “it’s the exception that proves the rule” is an old saying that I take to mean that for example when something occasionally goes wrong it draws attention to the fact that it has been taken for granted just how accurate everything else is
2 Mention was made recently of your faulty sports movies link and it reminded me of how well your links and cross references work overall. I depend on the latter a lot in maintaining the consistency of my own database onto which as you know I transcribe a great number of your figures and frankly your own consistency across the board is astonishing given the large number of pages you have produced, the depth of many of those pages, and variety of film-going aspects that you are covering.
3 Accordingly you and ‘Mrs Columbo’ are to be sincerely congratulated.
Hey Bob….Thanks as always for the kind words. We try our best…..but the massive amount of links and information…some mistakes fall through the cracks. I think you will like the last section at the bottom of our brand new page…Mr. Walter Pidgeon. I so look forward to when our website is “dynamic”. Burt and Dean and Airport now match. 🙂
BRUCE
Thanks will now give Walt a detail examination
BOB.
Very cool that I wake up to so many comments…..but I have to go to work….so it will be awhile before I respond to those comments….but thanks for taking the time to write them.
Excellent. Yes! Gratifying. Meanwhile, we will respond to ach other.