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.
Hello Bruce,
If it interests some of you, I publish on the site of a friend (Box office story), the top 10 of 1922, based on Variety’s weekly pictures grosses. I add some information and anecdotes. I will publish the annual top 50 for the 1920s at a rate of 10 per week.
Bruce, can I put the link to the article on your site?
Hey Laurent….would love to see your box office article. You can include the link on a return comment …..the comment will be sent to my “approval” box….but I will approve it right away. I had to put a link block in comments because spammers will trying to take over the website. I am sure the readers here would like to see it too.
Thank you Bruce. Here the link :
http://www.boxofficestory.com/box-office-usa-1922-top-10-a130382786
Very cool. Sadly I am not as impressive as you….”I only speak two languages….English and Bad English”. Still I am able to understand the column headings. With great interest I looked at the 4th and 5th columns which represent the rental numbers. Look forward to seeing future years. Thanks for sharing.
Hey Bruce,
Thank you, but I’m not impressive. As we say in France, “Google is my friend.” Lol. It help me very much. With Google Chrome you can easily translate the web pages. It simplifies a lot for the understanding of foreign languages. With it, I’m multi-language Lol.
Not matter how you are doing it…..you my friend are truly impressive……no way I could maintain a conversation in any other language than English. 🙂
1. BRUCE I feel that if a movie with 6 big stars grosses $200 Million and a Paul Muni movie where he is the only star grosses the same amount Paul should be given greater credit. There is no perfect way of organising that as performers in the multi-star vehicles will normally have differing box office status. However for fun I have devised a simple method which I am applying to each big star’s Top 20 Cogerson hits and here are examples using two Mumbles movies.
2 Marlon was the only star of The Wild One so he gets the entire $120 million you quoted for that movie and Marvin in a supporting role gets nothing However Guys & Dolls had 4 recognised stars so Sinatra, Simmons, Vivian Blaine and Mr M all get $100 million each from your $300 million I’ll possibly do a separate supporting actors exercise.
3 The biggest stars so far of the 1930s/40s are Lucille Fay LeSueur and Betty Grable, though I can’t remember the woman ranked 50th whose surname also begins with an L. Each list covers 2 decades and the No 5 ranked star in the 1950s/60s s is not King Gable but– King Presley. King G loses three quarters of his Cogerson GWTW gross.
4 All this is of course for private amusement and I am aware that no professional body or movies site would use the method, that you don’t see it my way, and that even if Stonewall Torrey thought it was marvellous he would concoct one hundred tons of condescending c**p to ridicule it simply because it comes from me, so a loftily dismissive reaction from Stonewall has as the Stock Market analysts say already been “factored in” to my ego. [I doubt if Torrey will heed the advice from me in a previous post to in effect “Be nice,” as Dalton repeatedly instructed his team of subordinate bouncers in Road House.]
5 Also credit where credit is due. Without the massive body of stats that you have collected and published over the year such an exercise would have been impossible for me so you have my sincerest thanks.
BRUCE – CORRECTION AND APOLOGIES
Para 2 of my previous post should of course read “all get $75 million each from your $300 million”.
I don’t have your ruthless cutting edge so my automatic pilot probably rebelled at not giving Mr M a fill$100 million for Gs & Ds
Hey Bob. Interesting research you are doing. The biggest issue I see, it is too subjective. One person might have a different perspective than another. For example: You say four stars carried Guys and Dolls….in my mind it was just Frank and Brando.
Betty Grable was huge at the box office in the 1940s…..the reviews for her movies were good but not great and she and her movies got very little Oscar love. To me the Top Star of the decade should excel in all 3 categories.
If Loy is ranked 50th then that makes no sense…that to me means you are punishing the performers to much. Despite being labeled a Loy fan….I have not seen many of her movies. Just when I look at her stats and read about her influence she was one of the biggest stars working….not the 50th.
As always good feedback…even if I do not I agree with all of it.
HI BRUCE
1 Thanks for your quick feed back . I will shortly be letting you have a brief snapshot of some of my total findings. Meanwhile here are a few thoughts in response to what you have said.
(1) I am dealing with box office performance only in this exercise. Once you go beyond known statistics everything is subjective. Oscars are the result of opinion and movie politics and in my view as I have said before I think Grant should have had more Oscar success but for me absence of it does not reduce his Hreatness in my eyes because of the subjectivity
(2) The kind of criteria that you mention was probably the sort that was used for the AFI Legends lists because if it had been box office driven Bud would have been lucky to make the list at all as would Audrey Hepburn, Larry O and MM depending on how much average grosses are taken into account as well as total grosses. Your UMR scores do a good job in ranking actors on the basis of broad achievements and I don’t have your resources and skills to tackle such a project.s.
(3) Even my stats are though being subjected to an element of REASONED subjectivity and for example whilst generally I am ignoring supporting performances Nicholson Easy Rider one would be recognised as would Sinatra’s From Here to Eternity.
(4) Otherwise as you suggest I am being very strict and am recognising only proper stars in full length roles.. Even Superman Returns is not getting in! nor are all those ensemble movies like Till the Clouds Roll By in which every star is in a cameo role in effect. And sorry Bruce little Asta has no chance of being recognised and he is lucky his mistress got 50th place..
Still it’s all great fun and whilst I will be diligent in compiling the list I will not take the results too seriously. It’s just another way at looking at things. “Variety is the spice of life!”
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Thanks for the kind words Kitty…..they are greatly appreciated.
Please let me know if you’re looking for a author for your site.
You have some really great articles and I think I would be a
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Hey Katia…..how about sharing your link here…..and I can see if we are a good match or not. If you do the link…..it will send your comment to my approval section…..but I will be able to see it. 🙂
I don’t know whether it’s just me or if everybody else encountering problems with your site.
It looks like some of the written text on your posts are running off the
screen. Can somebody else please provide feedback and let me know if this is happening to them as well?
This may be a problem with my web browser because I’ve had this happen previously.
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Hey Junko….I know on some devices…reading the massive tables is not much fun….but hopefully in the future we will have an app for that. On a regular computer or an i-Pad it should work better…which device is causing the most problems for you?