You know those types of people that keep a weird number of lists? Like, for some reason they just keep lists of all the beers they’ve tasted or all the National Parks they’ve been to, all the books they’ve read, or every country they’ve taken a shower in. I am one of those lists people. I don’t mean to say I keep track of the countries I’ve showered in, that was just an example. Most of the lists I keep fall into the category of “List of Greatest ______ of All Time”, E.G. greatest movies, soundtracks, songs, cars, actors, etc. Some of my lists are more abstract like greatest smells, disappointments (not sports related), accents, or laughs. Well, I was looking at my Greatest Movieslist and I decided to do some research to find some statistics to analyze about them. I collected data on release dates, genres, writers and Directors.
Honestly, I’m not sure why I think this is worth writing a blog post about but I guess it’s good to mix in mediocre blog posts. I mean, every other post is so astoundingly brilliant and mind blowing that people might not keep believing I’m capable of it all on my own unless I throw in some boring ones. That was sarcasm obviously but whatever.
Let’s get the quick stuff out of they first. I have 36 movies on this list. The earliest film is His Girl Friday from the year 1940 and the newest film is from 2018. I hesitate to say what that 2018 film is called for reasons I’ll get to later. Maybe a little teaser like that will keep you invested in reading? There is only one writer who appears more than once and that’s Pixar’s Pete Doctor for Up (2009) and Inside Out (2015). To be fair he co-wrote both with multiple people credited with helping in Writing, Story, and Screenplay so I wouldn’t get too much into praising him. 4 films are based on real events with one of those 4 being an actual documentary, the only documentary on the list but, I will say I haven’t seen all that many documentaries so if you have some incredible documentary like “Hearts of Darkness” that I just implied is not on this list it’s because I haven’t seen it.
Basically that finishes up everything but talking about the timeline of when these movies were released. I guess I also should have kept track of what country each film came from but I’m not taking the time to go back and skim through all the Wikipedia pages again. Anyway, let’s see how many of my personal G.O.A.T. movies came out in each decade. This is where a formatting system that doesn’t rely on fucking Blocks would be nice so I could do some bullet points or something. Freakin’ WordPress P.O.S. I’ll see what I can do but I’ve known WordPress to reformat my posts to look different from how I’m seeing it while writing it.
- 1940’s- 5 films
- 1950’s- 3
- 1960’s- 6
- 1970’s- 5
- 1980’s- 2
- 1990’s- 6
- 2000’s- 3
- 2010’s- 6
There are four single years that contain the release of two films, those being 1947, 1975, and 1998. The year 1979 actually has three films on my G.O.A.T. list. There are also two 5 year long gaps without even one of these films. That would be 1970-1974 and 1980-1984.
Now, obviously the numbers seem to suggest that the 60’s, 90’s, and 2010’s were the best decades for movies but here is where I have to explain why I didn’t say the name of that 2018 film before. You see, in my list of G.O.A.T. movies there are 17 movies with an asterisk next to them. These are the best of the best and while I could have made the list only these ones that would just exclude alot of great movies and also essentially make keeping the list incredible boring since it almost never gets additions. In fact that special tier of films hasn’t grown since 2009. That’s why I wanted to make sure I could take about the 2010’s specifically.
While the 2010’s have 6 great films non of them are top tier and to honest there’s only one film from that decade that I haven’t debated with myself about just getting rid of them from the list. I could very easily be convinced that while I really like these other 5 movies they aren’t really worthy of being on this list. It’s actually quite odd. There are 5 movies in the 2010’s that I think might not deserve their spots but outside of that decade there is only 1 movie that even causes me to hesitate at all. Actually, the more I think about no, I can’t see myself getting rid of Field of Dreams (1989), meaning that while the 2010’s have 6 great films it really isn’t nearly as strong as it looks.
Obviously, I’m pretty biased towards my own opinion so I simply believe that these movies in the 2010’s just aren’t as good but I guess it could be some sort of recency bias where movies that are products of the society and culture I live in right now are simply more boring to me. I really don’t think I’ve fallen into that trap but I felt I had to bring it up as a possibility. If we only look at this tippity-top tier of films here’s the timeline.
- 40’s- 3 – His Girl Friday, A Walk in the Sun, and The Bishop’s Wife
- 50’s- 1 – Ben-Hur
- 60’s- 3 – Lawrence of Arabia, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and Cool Hand Luke, West Side story
- 70’s- 4 – Monty Python’s Holy Grail, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Monty Python’s Life of Brian
- 80’s- 1 – The Breakfast Club
- 90’s- 3 – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Shawshank Redemption, and The Truman Show
- 00’s- 2 – Stranger Than Fiction, and Up.
- 10’s- 0
1979, by the way, has three top tier films and is the only year to have more than one. There are 2 eleven year long lengths of time between top tiers, those being 1948-1958 and 2010 to the present day. That, of course, doesn’t include 2021.
The only other thing to talk about is genres. It was hard to put some movies like Inside Out, The Bishop’s Wife, and Up into a single category and I’m sure some people would have made different choices. According to me, the person in charge of this shit, the genre of Drama absolutely dominates the rankings with 18 of the 36 films and 10 of the 17 top tiers. Comedy comes in with 6 films including 4 top tiers. Then, Action, War, and Musical each have 2 films with only 1 top tier in War. Documentary, Western, Sci-Fi, and Romance all have just one and Horror is entirely empty though Alien (1979) and The Thing (1982) almost made the list.
Damn man 1979 almost 4 G.O.A.T. films. There are three entire decades with less than 4. Anyway, like I said, I don’t really have some sort of message or lesson in mind while writing this. In fact, I’d probably rate this as my most boring post ever but fuck it. I’ve been really failing at consistently posting here so I guess I just decided I’d rather fail at quality than continue failing at quantity for a change, though I guess my quality hasn’t exactly been amazing either. Whatever, I find statistical analysis interesting and since my baseballs teams are bad I guess this will have do as my fix.
The Mind of Joshypoo 