For years, Crash, which even director Paul Haggis thinks shouldn’t have won Best Picture, was the most frequently rented movie on Netflix, because of a strange set of circumstances involving when it was released and also people having terrible taste. It may still be number one, but the only people who still get those envelopes in the mail are grandparents and Brendan Fraser fans.
So it’s definitely still number one.
The IMDb version of Crash is The Shawshank Redemption, which has topped the Top 250 chart, “as voted by IMDb Users,” for about as long as the database has been around. People love themselves some freedom crawls (especially when it’s on TNT in the afternoon), and also Leonardo DiCaprio, based on IMDb’s “Top User-Rated Movies by Year” findings. To celebrate 25 years of conversations like “I think I saw her in an old episode of Roseanne, I’m going to look her up,” IMDb shared “the top 25 films from the last 25 years, as voted on by millions of IMDb users (The Shawshank Redemption alone has received more than 1.5 million votes),” according to Vanity Fair.
2014: Interstellar
2013: The Wolf of Wall Street
2012: Django Unchained
2011: Intouchables
2010: Inception
2009: Inglourious Basterds
2008: The Dark Knight
2007: Into the Wild
2006: The Departed
2005: Batman Begins
2004: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2003: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
2002: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
2001: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
2000: Memento
1999: Fight Club
1998: Saving Private Ryan
1997: Life Is Beautiful
1996: Fargo
1995: Se7en
1994: The Shawshank Redemption
1993: Schindler’s List
1992: Reservoir Dogs
1991: The Silence of the Lambs
1990: Goodfellas
Why so much Leo?
Col Needham, who founded IMDb as a downloadable software available on the earliest version of the internet, won’t provide a theory on why his users love Leo. “To be absolutely honest the common thread is they’re all great movies,” he says over the phone from England, where he still lives. “This is a great list. It reflects the votes of 250 million IMDb customers who are spread throughout the world.” (Via Vanity Fair)
The top-rated movie for 2015 so far is Inside Out (8.4), which is not how you spell Mad Max: Fury Road, so this entire list is bunk. Oh, what a day, what a lovely day to unsubscribe from IMDb.
(Via Vanity Fair)