This UMR pages takes a look at the Top 200 Movie Stars Statistically Speaking.  So how did we end up with this massive table?  Well let me tell you.  Recently we finished a 5 year project on the AFI Top 50 Screen Legends. The AFI Top 50 screen legends were movie stars that started making movies before 1950.  Many times while working on those pages we thought…”Wonder who would be the AFI Screen Legends for actors that started making movies after 1950?”  

So we came up with the idea of creating our own Top 50 Screen Legends 1950-2010.   It did not take too long to realize that picking the best actors and actresses over the last 60 years was going to be very challenging.  On the actor side we identified 47 very solid candidates and on the actress side we identified 29 solid candidates.  So we were faced with the problem off coming up with a way to select the Top 25 actors and actresses.  So using our massive movie database that is filled with almost a million  movie stats, we created the following table.  Basically the movie stars got points for each successful movie that they appeared in. To us..a movie is successful when it either makes money at the box office, receives good reviews by critcs and audiences or wins some major movie awards.

When running the reports that retrieved all of these stats….it brought along the classic stars too.  At first we were going to delete the classic stars from the table…..but eventually we realized that since this is a table of stats we should include both the classic and current stars.  So we will eventually be posting our Top 50 Screen Legends 1950-2010..but until then we thought this was interesting enough to post.

Top 200 Movie Stars Statistically Speaking

The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

• Column One – Movies:  Movies in our database that starred the actor or actress
• Column Two – $100 Million B.O:  Number of $100 million adjusted domestic box office hits the actor or actress appeared in.  Each movie was worth 1 point.  John Wayne had the most and earned 46 points.
• Column Three – Best Picture:  Number of Best Picture Oscar® nominated movies the actor or actress appeared in.  Nomination was worth 1 point..a win was worth 2 points.  Jack Nicholson led the way with 13 points…7 Best Picture nominees and 3 Best Picture winners.
• Column Four – 60% Fresh:  Number of movies that earned at least 60% approval rating from critics and audiences.  Each movie was worth 1 point. Orson Welles led the way with 62 points.
• Column Five – Noms. Wins:  Number of individual Oscar® nominations and wins the actor or actress received.  Nomination worth 3 points…a win worth 5 points.  Meryl Streep was the leader with 63 points.  16 nominations and 3 wins.
• Column Six – Movie Noms:  Number of Oscar® nominated movies (any category) the actor or actress appeared in.  Nomination was worth 1 point..a win was worth 2 points.  Spencer Tracy was the leader with 42 points….30 movies nominated….12 won.
• Column Seven – Quigley:  The number of times an actress or actor appeared on the annual Quigley Top 10 box office stars.  Each time equals one point. John Wayne made the list 25 times.
• Column Eight – Points:  Total of the previous six columns…John Wayne is the leader.
• Column Nine – Points Per Movie – Column Eight divided by Column One…James Dean has the best average.