The Big List Of Great Films: According To Humans Everywhere (Ranked)

Selecting the absolute best movies of all time is no easy task, and everyone has differing opinions on the subject - so in an effort to solve this issue I just merged them all together! The Big List Of Great Films: According To Humans Everywhere (Ranked) — or "BLOGFATHER" for short — is a combined and ranked collection of the following 14 respected lists, publications, and charts, which are listed below in order of their assigned *weight.

weight • Publication Name (# of films), date published

1.00 • Empire's Greatest Movies (500), 2008
0.95 • AFI's Greatest American Movies (123), 1997, 2007
0.95 • Empire’s Best Films Of World Cinema (100), 2013
0.90 • IMDb's Top Rated Movies (250), 2016
0.90 • All Time Adjusted Box Office Gross (200), 2017
0.85 • Letterboxd's Top Movies (250), 2017
0.80 • BBC Culture's 21st Century's Greatest Films (100), 2016
0.75 • Best Picture Academy Award Winners (89), 2017
0.65 • Reddit's Aggregated Greatest Movies (1000), 2016
0.60 • Rotten Tomatoes Top Movies (100), 2017
0.55 • Metacritic Highest Scores (500), 2017
0.50 • They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (1000), 2017
0.32 • AFI's Greatest American Movies - Nominees (300), 2007
0.28 • Bounty Books' Must-See Movies (501), 2004

Each list was assigned a weight between .25 and 1.0 in order to achieve a fair balance of their importance, credibility, popular consensus, and my own inherent biases. Older, American-focused publications have been deliberately offset by newer, foreign-focused lists to achieve an equal-opportunity metric. More than half of the combined 4,989 entries were duplicates, leaving us with 2,270 unique films. The more lists a film is included on, and the stronger its position on those respective lists, the higher it ranks - with a combined maximum score of 10,000. But ultimately, only 3,180 points were needed to crack the top-100.

Unsurprisingly, "The Godfather" placed first with a total score of 7,770 ("Casablanca", a distant second with 6,026 points). And so, the title of this exhaustive effort was backronymed to reflect this movie's cinematic prominence.

Besides that gangster epic (which appeared eleven times), it was "Lawrence Of Arabia", "On The Waterfront", and "Jaws" that managed an impressive ten showings, with 21 other films appearing on nine of the 14 lists. Due to the aforementioned foreign/domestic separation, appearing on 12/14 lists is the theoretical maximum.

Here's an awesome graph that shows the distribution of the 1,000 films by year. 1973 and 2004 have the most entries, with 21 each. For more insight into this list, and to assign your own 'weight' for re-sorting, click here to view the Google Sheet version - which includes all the expanded entries beyond rank #1000.

Given the complexity and time needed to assemble this list, I will not be updating it regularly. This current version includes 2016 releases ("Moonlight" ranks highest at #214), but nothing newer.