Rusty's Bleeding Edge Page

In a moment of idle curiosity, I wondered whether there was really a "golden age" for cinema. Maybe the IMDB Top 250 could shed some light, despite an obvious preference for recent films?

I broke the stats into 5 year segments: 1920 means 1920 thru 1924 inclusive. For the 2005-2009 segment, I extrapolated by 1.4, since we're only 3 1/2 years through that.

First I looked at raw numbers. How many movies from each 5 year segment feature in the IMDB top 250? This tops with the 2005-2009 section (extrapolated to 42 movies):

But that makes #250 count the same as #1. So if we weight each one, such that #1 gets 250 points, #2 gets 249 points, and #250 gets 1 point:

So clearly, the 50s (eg. 1957's 12 Angry Men at #10) was one peak, around 1980 (eg. Star Wars trilogy in 1977, 1980 and 1983 at #12, #9 and #109), and another may have just passed us in 2000 (eg. Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2001, 2002 and 2003 at #20, #31 and #14).

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