Selecting the absolute best movies of all time is no easy task, and since every list, magazine, website, and person has different opinions - I used formula-based math to merge everything together!

The Big List Of Great Films: According To Humans Everywhere (Ranked) — or "BLOGFATHER" for short — is a combined and ranked collection of the following 20 respected lists, publications, and charts: listed below in order of their assigned weight.

Score-Multiplier • Publication Name (# of films), Date Published / Retrieved

1.00 • Empire's Greatest Movies (500), 2008
0.95 • Empire’s Best Films Of World Cinema (100), 2013
0.90 • AFI's Greatest American Movies (123), 1997, 2007
0.85 • IMDb's Top Rated Movies (250), 2020
0.80 • Letterboxd's Top Narrative Movies (250), 2020
0.80 • All Time U.S. Adjusted Box Office Gross (1000), 2020
0.75 • Best Picture Academy Award Winners (90), 2018
0.70 • BBC Culture's 21st Century's Greatest Films (100), 2016
0.60 • They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (100), 2020
0.55 • BFI: Sight & Sound (250), 2012
0.50 • MUBI (1000), 2020
0.45 • Metacritic Highest Scores (1000), 2020
0.40 • Best Foreign-Language Films (71), 2019
0.40 • Rotten Tomatoes (100), 2020
0.40 • AFI's Greatest American Movies - Nominees (300), 2007
0.35 • Roger Ebert's Great Movies (372), 2013
0.30 • Bounty Books' Must-See Movies (501), 2004
0.25 • Movies You Must See Before You Die, by Steven Jay Schneider (1001), 2019
0.20 • Best Picture Nominees *excludes winners (471), 2020
0.20 • Palme d'Or Winners (92), 2019

In an (admittedly flawed) effort to achieve a fair balance of each list's importance, credibility, popular consensus, and my own inherent biases each list was assigned a weight / score-multiplier between .20 and 1.0. For example, older, American-focused publications have been deliberately offset by newer, foreign-focused lists to (hopefully) equalize and diversify the final rankings. Among all twenty collections, more than half of the 8,552 total movies appeared on multiple lists, leaving us with 3,674 unique films.

The more lists a film is included on (100 bonus points per appearance), and the stronger its position is on those respective lists, the higher it ranks – simple enough, right? Given the mutually exclusive nature of several lists, 10,900 points is the (very) theoretical maximum. But ultimately, only 4,500 points were needed to crack the top-100.

Unsurprisingly "The Godfather" placed first with a total score of 9,569. And so, the title of this exhaustive effort was backronymed to reflect the 1972 Best Picture winner's cinematic prominence. Impressively, the top three is rounded out by two of Francis Ford Coppola's other 1970s epics ("Apocalypse Now", and "The Godfather: Part II") with 8,237 and 8,098 points, respectively. Well done, Francis!

This graph shows the distribution of the 1,000 films by year. Thanks to the deliberate weighting and curation of this collection, most movies are decently spread across the century, with 1973 containing the most entries, with 20.

Credit where due, my original version of this list was partially inspired by a similar, but smaller effort by Top10ner - but I wanted to create a version that included more opinions and publications, while allowing YOU the ability to re-sort the list based on YOUR preferences. So, for more insight into this list, and to assign your own 'weight' for re-ranking, please visit the Google Sheet version - which also includes all 3,674 unique films.

Hint: "Make a copy" of the sheet for your own use, select everything below and to the right of cell B5, then click "Data" > "Create a Filter" for easy sorting and filtering! This not only allows personal restructuring of the entire list, but more intricate comparisons, like only seeing films from 1985 that appeared on both IMDb and Letterboxd, for example.

Given the complexity and time needed to assemble this list, I will not be updating it regularly (maybe every 3 years?). This 2020 update includes seven new lists ("Ebert's Great Movies", the "Palme d'Or Winners", "Foreign-Language Films", "1001 Must-See Movies Before You Die", "Best Picture Nominees", "MUBI Top 1000", and "BFI Sight & Sound"), the "Box Office" and "Metacritic" lists were expanded to 1,000 entries, the score-multiplier was tweaked for many lists, while all ongoing collections were updated to their 2020 rankings.

* If you've seen more than 75% of this list, you can call yourself a MOVIE BLOGFATHER! *

Share your %-watched total below!