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.
Done with your requests Pops.
Thank you Scotty…..your help with the pets and the website were greatly appreciated….if only you would have “shocked the pool”….lol.
Wishing all my fellow Canadians on UMR a Happy Canada Day!
HI O ORACLE! I have been in a bit of a quandary for some time about how to interpret stats for movies that I saw in double bills and I have been meaning to refer the matter to you for your advice.
Double bills seem to be a thing of the past everywhere now but in the 1950s in the United Kingdom at least they were the norm for all “programmers” ie routine films of broadly standard lengths.
In 1956 I watched in a double bill on their Northern Ireland premiere Dana Andrews in While the City Sleeps and Robert Stack in Great Day in the Morning. Your 1956 annual review credits those two films with $41.9 million and $30.3 million respectively.
However if they were on the same double bill in the States each of them would obviously have been watched by the total audience that is reflected in the combined income of $72.2 million for the two movies. Even if each of them was part of a different double bill the total income for the 2 movies in that bill would be split and it would once more be the combined income that accurately reflected the overall audience size.
I am primarily interested in an movie’s earnings rather than its audience size and your tables are of immense value to me in that they reasonably accurately reflect the individual incomes of movies regardless of whether any income is part of an overall split. However I have often wondered, purely as an academic aspect, if the splitting of a total income for a double bill is eschewing one’s impression of the total audience that actually saw each of the components on the double bill. Any thoughts on the subject?
NOTE: Droves movies in your tables were released on double bills over here, and the following are just a few examples though you will see that there are some big names and even a few reasonably/moderately important movies involved in the packages concerned.
1/Holden’s Oscar winning Stalag 17 and Reagan’s Tropic Zone.
2/George Sanders’ Death of a Scoundrel and Richard Egan’s Tension at Table Rock.
3/Crawford/Jeff Chandler’s Female on the Beach and sci-fi This Island Earth
4/Holden’s Escape from Fort Bravo and Debbie Reynolds’ Give a Girl a Break
5/Tony Curtis’ So This is Paris and Audie Murphy’s Destry
6/Loretta Young’s Because of You and Rock Hudson’s Horizons West
7/John Wayne’s Big Jim McClain and a Brit comedy love’s a Luxury
8/Glenn Ford’s The Sheepman and James Mason/Rod Steiger’s Cry Terror
8/Glenn’s 3.10 to Yuma and Richard Conte’s The Brothers Rico.
9/Jimmy Stewart’s Bend of the River and Scott Brady’s Bronco Buster.
10/Heston’s Arrowhead and Tony Curtis/Janet Leigh’s Houdini
[Butts in] Bob Bob Bob, I’m so glad I’m not interested in the minutiae of movie grosses, you know the old saying ‘ignorance is bliss’ and I sleep like a baby at night not knowing or caring how much Jeff Chandler’s Female on the Beach grossed 60 years ago. [Bob fumes] 😉
Wait… I’m not that cold on the subject, I do follow the new film grosses each week… but… I don’t jot them down on paper or memorise them. [cue growls]
hmm I suppose this hobby is akin to trainspotting, I think thats a good analogy.
HI MR LENSMAN
At the end of the day it’s the money that movies make that keeps it all going, crass though that fact is
All those highly talented people that producers have at their disposal would be like persons “All dressed up with nowhere to go” if financial backer didn’t feel that big grosses were a potential reward for their investments in production so you can bet that the money men such as I keep a close eye on grosses generated at the moment and on historical trends as well. so your Mr Cogerson and his wealth of statistical information about the movies is a Godsend to us money vulture in that respect.
It’s all very well to say that grosses earned 60 years ago don’t matter but without them we wouldn’t have the rich reservoir of past movies that we can enjoy even today on DVD etc. Your own idol Mr Heston’s great classics cost in today’s dollars a reported $130 million for Ben Hur and approx $120 million for Ten Commandments. Where would that money have come from if financial backers hadn’t been attracted by the lure of profit from grosses.
Indeed without the lure of big money from audiences and spectators there could be much less talent available in any field of activity. For example Bjorn Borg revealed that he would have preferred ice hockey to tennis if there had been sufficient money in the former and apparently Mr Marlon Brando turned down an offer from Sir John Gielgud to join him on a tour of English theatres because Hollywood was offering Mr Brando much more money. Indeed after 1953 Mr Brando forsook the stage entirely and Miss Liz had to defend criticism of Mr Burton for being more attracted to Hollywood gold than the British theatre.
So remember Money Never Sleeps or Dies and lunch is for wimps! In short Viva La Grosses!
GORDON
HI STEVE
I have just read Gordon Gekko’s comprehensive rebuttal of your “rubbishing” the habit of viewers who are interested in historical grosses. Gordon would know a thing or two about money of any kind, Sport.
I need just add to what he said, Sport, that for us to be able to fully appreciate how great the stars of yesteryear were and how the greatness of one compares with that of another we do benefit from Bruce’s pages which enlighten us about many crucial factors such as awards history, critical review – and box office performance.
Your own fabulous posters and stills heighten that knowledge by illustrating how iconic and [very essential] photogenic the great stars of Old Hollywood were and a bonus is the ratings and award/nominations that you always include in your slides.
So as a dedicated an unashamed movie buff I make no apologies, Sport, for my fascination with ALL elements of the equation that I have just mentioned. Anyway have a good weekend, Sport.
It’s still trainspotting I tells ya! 🙂
What about the cost of each movie, isn’t that interesting too? I’m not making fun of you Bob. I’m just more fascinated seeing people wanting, nay, desiring the box office info for old movies than I am for the the stats themselves. A study in human nature. [Bob groans]
It is like the re-releases, and horrible to reverse back into the numbers. From what I’ve read, the double-bill mates largely depended on regions, and two movies were not linked together consistently in all the same places. It is very frustrating, but I have noticed that the first movie always seems to have the greater gross. Wether it happened or not. Those damn movie producers…. why didnt they keep better records and release them to the public! Sorry I do not have a better answer than that. (Written by Voice to text functionality)
BRUCE Thanks for the interesting response
Variety has never listed two movies in their Variety Top Grossing Movies together. You would think they would if two movies had the same exact box office result. Just another frustrating thing about Hollywood’s book keeping limitations.
Hey Bob…we just bought you something…if you share your address we will get it in the air in the next few days….do you still have my e-mail address?
Hey Laurent….glad you are are not dead….lol. The link did not appear……with your 1920 pages and my yearly reviews from 1930 to 1972……we only need a few more years to connect to Box Office Mojo…..and have a box office bridge from the 1920s to 2018. Glad to hear from you.
Hey Bruce,
Here is the link ;
http://www.boxofficestory.com/box-office-usa-1926-autres-films-hors-top-50-a145377690
Awesome link. Love the posters. Thanks as always for sharing.
Hello everyone !
No I was not dead, and for those interested, after several months of absence, here is the American box office dumb, with a last page devoted to 1926.
Enjoy.
Hello Laurent
Glad to hear from you and i just drink a glass of excellent white wine, a Chablis, and i will go to see you 1926 page as soon as possible
A bientot
Pierre
Hello Pierre,
Santé ! In moderation as it should, of course 😉
I hope that the content of this new page will please you.
See you soon.