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.
My heart is broken but what care I?
Such pride inside me has woken
I’ll try my best not to cry
By and by
When the final farewells must be spoken
I’ll join the Legion, that’s what I’ll do
And in some far distant region
Where human hearts are staunch and true
I shall start my life anew
Good-bye, it’s time
I sought a foreign clime
Where I may find
There are hearts more kind
Than I leave behind and so, I go
To fight a savage foe
Although I know that
I’ll be sometimes missed by the girls I’ve kissed
In some Abyssinian French Dominion
I shall do my bit and fall for the flag if I must
Where the desert sand is nice and handy
I’ll be full of grit
You won’t see my heels for the dust
I’ll do or die
You’ll know the reason why
When told of bold Leopold’s last stand
For the Fatherland
Good-bye, good-bye
I wish you all a last good-bye
Good-bye, good-bye
I wish you all a last good-bye.
NOTES: Translation of “Adieu Mein Kleiner Gardeoff” as sung by the jilted head-waiter Leopold in The White Horse Inn an Operetta or Musical comedy by Ralph Nenatzky and Robert Stolz who some say were the Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn Austrian song-writing team.
The great Austrian Tenor Richard Tauber made a famously-acclaimed foreign language 1931 record of the song with Irish tenor Josef Locke also well-known for his translated version of the song. The song was included in the 1991 movie Hear My Song in which Ned Beatty played Locke to Josef’s own voice doing the singing.
The White Horse Inn had premiered as a straight play in 1897; it was made into a silent film in 1926 with Max Hansen as Leopold; and was almost forgotten when the then highly-influential Emil Jannings re-discovered it and encouraged its 1930s revival. Jannings was of course the Professor Immanuel Rath who obsessed over temptress Dietrich in the classic 1930 movie The Blue Angel [which might have been a good aka for The Thin Woman if she had ever strayed into porn production!]
“Trust is like virginity: either you’ve got it or you haven’t,” pronounced Cooper to doubting wife Debs Kerr in Marlon Brando Senior’s production of 1961’s The Naked Edge [sadly Big Coop’s final film]. Or did Gary mean Virginia-ty?; after all he did play the iconic Virginian in the 1929 film.
Certainly these days trust is missing when I post a response to a new Cogerson page as I find myself wondering if the exercise is a “dead rubber” as they say in sport.
And so it is that I now often sit and think about poor ole Leopold Brandmayer [or should that be BrandOmayer?] of The Work Horse Inn- sorry I meant White Horse Inn – see Part 2.
Anyway will the last person to leave this site kindly turn off the lights on the way out.
STEVE You say to The Work Horse “Good to see you wandering around here occasionally, almost like the goold days. I’ll pop round later and see what you’ve been up to.”
Where on earth did you catch a glimpse of the Great Academic? Did you travel back in time to “a long time ago in a galaxy far away”? Was he bandaged-up like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man?. In return for your strange relevation
Come, let me read the oft-read tale again!
The story of the Oxford scholar poor,
Of intellect and quick inventive brain,
Who, tired of knocking at preferment’s door,
One summer-morn forsook
His friends, and went to learn the gipsy-lore,
And roam’d the world with that wild brotherhood,
And came, as most men deem’d, to little good,
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.
[Matthew Arnold THE SCHOLAR GIPSY-1854]
Hey Bob. Well…I am at least keeping new material going on the website. Seems like every year my “teaching gig” takes up more and more time. I am teaching 7 classes every day. Most teachers in my school only teach 4 classes a day. All the prep time occurs at school…..the good news is….the school year is closing in on 75% complete…I can almost see the summer.
WH’s post refers. For me a big part of involvement with an internet site is the interaction with other contributors where it is available. Whilst the Cogerson site is still the best on the planet for information about -and analysis of – movies, their quality and box office performance, Steve IS right in his albeit playful and good-natured implication that the sparkle has to some extent gone off the site since the Halcyon days when WH engaged more with his viewers.
The Work Horse can probably quote some selective stat or other that seemingly attests to his continuing comprehensive one-to-one involvement with contributors but that would only make ME feel even worse: only around 4 or 5 out of 25 of my posts commenting on new pages in the past while have received a response and most of the others never attracted even a “thumbs up” to show that somebody had at least read them.
Indeed on two occasions WH did comment on a block of every post sent in response to a new page except that for some reason he drew the line at even acknowledging mine alone. He is undoubtedly overall such a nice fellow that I am sure he didn’t mean to be offensive but that’s no consolation when one has put a lot of serious effort into a matter. “He looked through me as if I were a leafless tree.” [Thomas Hardy Far from the Madding Crowd]
I am fully retired and my family is grown-up so that I am completely aware that I have a lot more time to devote to commenting on movies than have many others frequenting this site who have serious day-job commitments and who are commendably juggling the jobs with the raising/development of their families.
Nevertheless whilst Cogerson is still my fave internet site it IS disappointing that – though he [again commendably] has put a lot of effort into providing new pages and overall maintaining his site in most other respects – he could not give a priority to at least spreading his efforts a bit more equally between those other functions and directly communicating with his followers.
The scope for churning out new pages and raising fresh topics will probably – like the poor in the Bible – “always be with you” so I find it difficult to fathom why he has this compulsion to churn out new pages in seeming demonic [and on this occasion that is no reference to Joel!] fashion at the expense of interaction with certainly viewers such as I – in short: what’s his IMMEDIATE hurry to the extent that he gives the impression of shunning his ‘disciples’ in favour of his seeming OCD pursuit of new pages?
In Part 2 is a small sample of my recent posts that have attracted no commentary response. The Part 2 list would probably be much longer had I not for obvious reasons drastically reduced my posts since around last fall. The baby can ultimately go out with the bath water:
“He gave up the ghost.” The BIBLE -Miles Coverdale’s Version, 1535, Acts 12:23”
NOV 2020-UNTIL PRESENT: SELECTION OF POSTS FROM ME WHICH ATTRACTED NO COMMENTS
3 NOV Ollie Reed
11 NOV Basil Rathbone
12 NOV The Beatles
12 NOV The Beatles
12 NOV The Beatles
17 NOV Kirsten Dunst
28 NOV Piper Laurie
28 NOV Piper Laurie
28 NOV Miriam Hopkins
13 DEC Eric Roberts
29 DEC Ruth Chatterton
5 JAN Max Schell
5 JAN Max Schell
12 JAN Dan Stevens
28 JAN Tilda Swinton
28 JAN Cloris Leachman
28 JAN Cloris Leachman
16 FEB Rob Lowe
17 FEB Sydney Pollock
I don’t have an overview of the stats for WH’s responses to other viewers; but on the face of it the above list [on top of the low rate of response that I received to posts that I sent during the previous period and in fact from probably the start of 2020***] seem to point to just 2 alternatives: WH has been cold-shouldering more than he used to all/most of his followers – or else I have become the permanent short-straw guy on this site who is not even [to paraphrase Lee J Cobb in On the Waterfront] “Just ANOTHER guy around here!”
***Some months ago I sent WH a list of 20 posts [other than those mentioned above] to which I had also received no response; but I don’t know if he ever saw it.
In the period that this new list covers [Nov- present] WH fielded 81 new pages; most of them interested me; but I responded to about only 25% of them; and he in turn replied to about 20% of my responses. In the “good ole days” of regular high camaraderie on this site I would have commented on virtually 100% of new pages particularly those relating to individual performers.
I know when I’m beaten and when to give in. As I’ve said before The Past is a Foreign Country: They do Things Differently There. And now? – “never glad confident morning again.”
Hey Bob. Sorry I have not commented back on some of your posts. I will try and do better in the future. I was telling WoC about your comment and she did some research. Of the 50,243 comments here at UMR……there were 21,567 responded by me. Add in another 2302 comments by me that were done not under my WordPress name and you have 23,869 total Cogerson comments. So I make up almost half of the 50,243 comments. That means we have been lucky enough to have received 25,121 comments from readers. That means I have commented back on 95.06%of all comments. Looking at the comments from 2021 so far…here are the numbers..612 comments so far this year….261 from Cogerson and 14 from Cogerson not signed in (mostly the ones done at work during breaks)…for a total of 275 comments…meaning…I have responded to about 89.86% of the comments this year. So….statistically…I have dropped off in 2021….but I am still trying. Between work….WoC being gone….deaths in the family……my daughter being sick…….to dealing with frustration of this hobby costing more and more….I am still plugging along.
Bruce, if you’re there can you help? I posted a reply to Bob’s Rudyard Kipling video review but it seems to have been marked as spam and no longer there. Can you rescue it? Cheers.
Hey Steve….we were brave and went into the abyss of the spam box…….what a scary place….1000s of this week’s spam messages captured….the screaming and the agony was a lot to bear…we lost some of our retrieval crew….but we were able to bring back your comment.
Sorry your comment got put there….no sure why it did it….it does it to Bob’s comments…..though normally his go to a “approve” box…..not that scary spam box…lol.
Thanks Bruce, it must have been that lengthy poem I pasted on there that messed things up a bit. The system does not like long poems! I mean can you blame it? 🙂
p.s. Good to see you wandering around here occasionally, almost like the ooold days. I’ll pop round later and see what you’ve been up to.
2021 is off to a good start…January was our third best month ever….only trailing April 2020 and May 2020.
1st – April 2020 – 884,012 views
2nd – May 2020 – 775,737 views
3rd – January 2021 – 681,568 views
Thanks for all the support.