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The Academy Awards honor the best films of the year, but what’s the greatest film of all time? A study conducted by chemical and biological engineering professor Luis Amaral and Max Wasserman ’10 MS may have an answer to that time-old question. After conducting a study of more than 15,000 films listed in the Internet Movie Database, they found that the best predictor of a movie’s significance isn’t critics’ reviews or box office success. It’s how often the movie is referenced by other movies. The study looked at both subjective judgments, like awards and reviews, and objective statistics, like box office sales and citations, to see what factor was the best indicator of whether a movie would land in the National Film Registry, the industry’s “hall of fame.” Ultimately, the number of citations turned out to be the best predictor of greatness, particularly in movies 25 years old and older.
The top 10 movies of all time as of January 2015, using Luis Amaral and Max Wasserman’s method:
1. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
2. Star Wars (1977)
3. Psycho (1960)
4. Casablanca (1942)
5. Gone with the Wind (1939)
6. King Kong (1933)
7. Frankenstein (1931)
8. The Godfather (1972)
9. Citizen Kane (1941)
10. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
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