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 You are aware that whilst my main inflation adjustment method is the ticket inflation one that you too use I also have a separate database in which for comparison purposes I apply the CPI method of adjustment. In using the CPI method I am still heavily reliant on your adjusted grosses which I will convert back to actual grosses where you have not provided the latter and then do the CPI calculation.
2 However i for some movies I do not of course have any figures from you and have to rely on rental stats provided by Wikipedia or IMDB to which I will then apply the ratios quoted by you in your %Rental to Gross page. However by way of a test I have in cases where you HAVE given actual gross figures applied to Wikipedia/IMDB rentals for the movies concerned the ratios that you quote in your %Rental to Gross page page but unfortunately many times come up with different actual grosses from yours.
3 Which means of course that either I am misinterpreting your method of calculation or my rental figures differ from yours. Naturally the latter can’t be helped and you cannot be accountable for my use of figures that I have gotten from other sources. However I have provided some fictitious examples in the table below and would be grateful for your comments and to be advised of what your own actual gross figures would be in these examples.
1944/2.5 rental/Bruce ratio 31%/converted actual gross $8.0
1950/2.5 rental/Bruce ratio 22.5%/Converted actual gross$11.2
1955/2.5 rental/Bruce ratio 35%/converted actual gross $7.2
1960/2.5 rental/Bruce ratio 23%/converted actual gross $10.9
Many thanks BOB
Hey Bob…..the percentage shown in the %Rental to Gross is what is used to calculate the multiplier. Before finding these stats we used 2.2 times every rental no matter what year….the table only shows the % not the multiplier…not sure why we did not include it….and now I have forgotten the formula to calculate the multiplier….the database has made me so lazy….lol.
I will have to do some deeper research when I get home….plus I have 3 days off….and your comment and one from Kevin earlier have me thinking I need to revisit that table. Thanks for the comment and question.
1 Some 5 miles outside Belfast is a small town called Comber the outskirts of which contain a little 100 seat cinema under personal ownership which can be booked by individuals and groups for the showing of classic movies of their own choice at private functions. For example my family booked it so that a party of relatives and friends could celebrate my 65th birthday by viewing Casablanca. [Most of my family would have preferred Shane but my son vetoed that choice because it was a Ladd vehicle !]
2 The owner has a brother who has a twin facility a short distance away which provides the same private service and for some 30 years now the two brothers have made their own
fictional mainly horror films that have won prizes at amateur film festivals and competitions. Local television here showed a clip from one of them recently and in it a girl was sitting on the Comber beach when a ‘monster’ that was someone covered with a camouflage of tree leaves and branches emerged from a cave and terrorised her.
3 These two cinemas are decorated inside and outside with numerous posters and stills related to old movies particularly those of the horror genre. Up until the early 1950s the interiors and exteriors of all Belfast cinemas were adorned with not just posters but also with dozens of stills to advertise movies. However in the late 1950s competition from TV was hitting cinematic profits and costs had to be cut so the stills which were considered a luxury vanished and today only posters are used to promote films, and that may of course be the case elsewhere.
4 All of which is my long-winded way of leading up to asking you from where you get those marvellous historic stills that keep popping up in your videos such as that excellent photo of Gable and Russell in Jane’s recent video. Form what I have said above I’m sure you will appreciate why the best of those stills that you have selected have had such a nostalgic impact on me
Hi Bob, when I was young I used to frequent a west end shop called The Cinema Bookshop which sadly no longer exists. I bought rare film books from there and also stills and lobby cards.
I have a hard drive full of high quality posters and stills, all carefully sorted in categories . And it’s backed up twice, you can never tell when a drive will die on you. If a poster is damaged or torn I repair it using one of my imaging programs, which can take time. I would say its close to a million images of every type on three separate portable hard drives.
I also have computer programs that take frame captures from DVDs, for instance a snapshot each second of film, so I have folders full of screenshots from Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia, I used this when I was writing articles at hubpages of my favorite movies. I had to reduce the image size of each screenshot for each hub.
Here’s an example, my hub for How the West Was Won starring some actors you may have heard of –
http://hubpages.com/entertainment/How-The-West-Was-Won-1962-Illustrated-Reference
At the time I created that hub those screenshots only existed on that page, no where else on the net.
STEVE
Thanks for the further information and the link.
BOB
🙂
Hey Steve….I remember that page well…..and I agree it has some decent stars in that one….including 10 or so that have UMR pages. Thanks for sharing the link and explaining…both are appreciated.
Hey Bob…a very enjoyable comment to read…..that sounds like an awesome birthday party…even if you could not watch Shane. We have no theaters like that around my area. We do gave a community theater that actually does some good shows….currently they are performing Picnic…outside the box office they a poster of the Holden movie…too bad they are not showing the movie too.
Hello Bruce,
I love the new presentation of comments. WoC did a great job.
Thank you Laurent…..WoC is awesome……it has now been changed again since your comment…hope you like that one too…..:)
1 Thanks for the comments Bruce. Hanks is one of the few modern actors who is sometimes ranked with the likes of Stewart, Newman etc as an all time great STAR and he also on occasions is included with the likes of Nicholson and DeNiro as a great modern ACTOR.
2 For me the odd man out in your list is Samuel L Jackson because although statistically his movies are among the highest grossers in a great number of them he is not the star and he is not credited with being able to ‘open’ a movie the way Hanks or Cruise can. [In fact I do not know whether it is still the case but not long ago Samuel Jackson was the highest grossing actor in terms of actual box office – ie before adjusting for inflation.]
3 Anyway nice having these exchanges. My mother in law used to laugh at me for getting excited about grosses and she would chide me with the taunt “You’d think all those billions were going to you Bob.” Actually when one sees the fate of some people who have suddenly won the lottery maybe it’s just as well that Duke etc and not I got those fortunes “
Hey Bob.
1. I agree Tom Hanks is soaring with the legends for sure…..able to hang with the classic stars and the modern stars. On my Current Screen Legend page…..he is ranked 3rd….only trailing Nicholson and Newman……I think that is a stellar Top 3.
2. I agree about Samuel L. Jackson…..he is a supporting character in blockbuster after blockbuster….but if you look at his leading man roles….his box office numbers plumment. If I ever figure out a way to seperate supporting roles from leading roles…his page will be one of the first ones I updated.
3. “You’d think all those billions were going to you Bob.”….has been heard at my house to only it is “You’d think all those billions were going to you Cogerson.”….hey the numbers fascinate us…..and it is a pretty inexpensive hobby as well.
🙂
BRUCE
1 Thanks for the additional feedback. An actors politics don’t interest me except by way of background information but from some of the comments Steve has made I am sure that Tom’s political activities would appeal to Flora!
2 However Hanks’ environment work and his other social causes I do find interesting and I think that performers in general whose every negative action is reported [Russell Crowe !] do not get enough credit for their unselfish contributions to the community as in the case of Tom Hanks. His son Colin was a creepy villain in the TV series Dexter and I enjoyed his performance and marvelled at how much he was like his father when the latter was young.
3 Anyway Tom could certainly ‘open’ a movie as your Possibly Interesting Facts above illustrates – no shades of likeness with the career of Samuel L Jackson there ! but I will now switch my attentions back to the Classic Era and digest the new page on the once Mrs Chaplin.
Hey Bob
1. I am with you….I do not pay much attention to an actor’s political or sexual preference…..actually when I am researching information for the Possibly Interesting Facts section….many times it will say….”he/she was a lifetime supporter of the Republican/Democrat party”…..I always skip right by that and keep on looking.
2. It is good when a celebrity is willing to help out those who are in need….gotta respect a person that does that…..as for Colin Hanks…..I agree….with Scott Eastwood and Colin working it almost feels like we are getting added bonus Tom and Clint time. I recently watched a Scott Eastwood western….and many times it seemed like I was watching an early Clint western. I liked Colin’s turn on Dexter too….that was the last great season of that show.
3. Yep….Tom Hanks is a leading man for sure….though I think by the time 2026 gets here….Hanks will be a supporting actor. And some young actor, like Ryan Gosling, will be the young Hanks to Hanks’ Jackie Gleason (Nothing In Common) or Paul Newman (Road to Perdition). Thanks for sharing your movie thoughts.
HI BRUCE
1 I have been digesting some of the stats that you have thrown my way and I thank you for sharing them with me.
2 Hirschorn seems to me to be what your kindred statistician Nate Silver calls “an OUTLIER”
which in his trade is an opinion poll that is so far out of sync the others that it can be disregarded.
3 However you have inadvertently hit on an interesting point in what is a sensible quantity of movies for a meaningful survey? Dean only made 3 movies and was fortunate that they were hits but it gave him a ridiculously high average gross score whereas the likes of Duke and Cooper churned out so many movies that they were bound to make a lot of “dogs” as John has expressed it and those baddies will drag down their average. Conversely there is no way that somebody like Doris or Bud who made less than 40 films each are going to match the likes of Stewart or Gable in overall grosses when those two have made so many more films. Even Cruise hasn’t got near them with his 40 or so movies and Harrison Ford is the nearest I can immediately think of but he had the benefit of the Star Wars franchise.
3 But didn’t you have a stats table once that precluded stars with less than 22 movies ? which seems to me to be a sensible minimum but perhaps I’m mixing your site up with some other one that I have long since ceased to frequent.
BOB
Hey Bob.
1. I figured those rankings would make your eyes rise. I did save you the pain of reading what Hirchhorn had to say about Brando…it is pretty brutal.
2. I agree….his view on some of these actors if pretty far out in left field.
3. I think 20 is good number to use as a minimum….though every time I think that…Barbra Streisand and her 19 movies pops up into my head….and I think 19 is pretty close to 20…lol.
4. As for the list I had that excluded stars with less than 22 (I thought it was 20)….it was on one of the first two sites…not thinking it made it to this site….though I have lots of pages with star stats…like this one https://www.ultimatemovierankings.com/classic-actors-ranked-7-categories/ or this one https://www.ultimatemovierankings.com/top-200-movie-stars-statistically-speaking/
5. Tom Hanks is getting close to those all time great numbers…with Inferno and Sully I have his domestic box office total at $7.28 billion…..if he can make successful movies he could move from his current ranking of 15th into a spot in the Top 10….if he has another billion left in the tank he would be at $8.28 which move him ahead of Bogart and Fonda…and trailing only Cary Grant, Samuel L. Jackson, Bing Crosby, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Harrison Ford and John Wayne.
6. Thanks for the feedback.