The Best Movie Ever Has Already Been Made
Thirty years of IMDb Top 250 snapshots suggest the greatest film of all time already happened — and the top regions of the chart are freezing solid.
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) allows users to rate films on a scale from 1 to 10, and the list of top films used to be dynamic, with movies jumping in and out as new classics were discovered or as tastes changed. But now the youngest movie in the IMDb Top 10—The Dark Knight—is old enough to vote, and nothing made since 2008 has stayed in the Top 10. Not Inception (which visited and left), not Parasite, not Oppenheimer—nothing. In this post we will look at the trends in movie ratings and what they say about film quality.
The IMDb Top 250
To build these statistics, I logged into the Wayback Machine and pulled snapshots of the IMDb Top 250 list for every year that survives from 1996 to 2026. The dataset is 28 snapshots from the earliest surviving capture of imdb.com on November 19, 1996 up through 2026. The Wayback Machine lost 1998, 1999 and 2001, so those years are simply missing rather than guessed.
Here’s the 1996 Top 10, and it has enduring classics, then-recent hits, and obvious beneficiaries of an overexcited fan base:
Now we should obviously discount the two Wallace & Gromit short films as ineligible, but the overall list still shows many films highly regarded today: Star Wars, The Shawshank Redemption, Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, and Schindler’s List. Seven of the top ten spots were held by films less than a decade old, and Trainspotting and The Usual Suspects had just come out the year prior. While some of this was doubtless from the small sample size of voters online in 1996, this list still suggests a young film industry and a young and hungry fan base.
Now look at the Top 10 thirty years later in 2026. Seven of them are new entries, while the three incumbents have changed positions. Pulp Fiction may look like the only film that held still at #9, but it actually took the long way round, falling to #19 and climbing back to #4 before landing right back at #9. Very on-brand for a non-linear movie.
Yet now there are zero films in the Top 10 under ten years old, and the average film listed came out in 1986. In 1996, 59% of the broader Top 100 was less than a decade old; today it’s 11%. Moviegoers aren’t just getting pickier but more nostalgic every year. While the 1996 numbers were youthful, these 2026 numbers suggest an ossified film industry whose fans are apathetic about the new offerings.
The Deep Freeze
The share of brand-new films in the Top list has collapsed at every level. The #1 spot has changed hands exactly twice: Star Wars held it in 1996 and 1997; The Godfather took over from 2000–2007; and The Shawshank Redemption has held it ever since. This means that a film that actually flopped in theaters 32 years ago has been the internet’s favorite movie for decades.
The Top 10 tells the same story in slow motion. Through the early 2000s, a new film cracked it almost every year: Memento, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Dark Knight. Then the doors started closing: Inception got in for 2011 and later got bumped; Fight Club, already 14 years old, slipped in for 2013. Since then zero new films have appeared, and the list has only been the same ten features rearranging the furniture.
The Top 100 still has a pulse, but barely. Dune: Part Two (#59), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (#45) and 12th Fail (#71) all made it in recently. But the rate of brand-new Top 100 entrants has also been dropping by about one film every five years. Based on (naive) linear projections, both the entrant line and the under-ten-years-old line hit zero for the Top 100 around 2037. If you’re a director in film school with dreams of making a Top 100 movie, this means you have roughly eleven years left to do it.
But Why?
To anyone wondering at the reason for this decline, I pose the simple question of, “Have you not seen movies recently?” Every year studios release more sequels, prequels, interquels, and “bold reimaginings,” but every year we moviegoers shrug off the slop and go back to watching Andy Dufresne crawl through a sewer pipe. The conclusion is that the best movie ever has already been made, and perhaps even the ten best films have already been made. Indeed it feels like Hollywood itself stopped trying to make the best movie ever and only wants to make the most profitable version of a movie that already exists. In 2024, all ten of the highest-grossing films were sequels: Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4, Kung Fu Panda 4, even Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. But we were barely watching these anyway because our eyes were glued to our phones.
Decades ago films used to be produced on a startup model: a director would pitch an idea to the studio, then the studio would give them funding and a timeline in which to come back with a finished product. This is famously how Jaws got made: the studio gave a 26-year-old Spielberg a shark novel and $4 million and told him to come back with a shark movie. Even when the 55-day shoot ran to 159 days and the budget grew to $9 million, they still let him finish. This was a venture capital–style model of betting on a project and trusting that their one hit film that year would pay for all the misses.
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But today’s studio model is closer to a Google ad auction. A committee bets on signals of which IP tested well, which audience is under-served, and optimizes every decision for a reasonable rate of return. This model works well to repeatedly eke out a margin, but repeatability is exactly why all of the “film products” today look and feel the same. You can’t A/B test your way to a masterpiece like The Godfather — but you can A/B test your way to The Godfather Part III.
The crispest example of this is The Lord of the Rings. Back in the ’90s Peter Jackson pitched his film trilogy to Miramax, but when they balked at it he got New Line Cinema to back him. Yet the production was so expensive that New Line effectively bet the company on Jackson’s trilogy — it had to work. Ultimately the LotR films went on to gross $3 billion, and to this day LotR is the most load-bearing trilogy of the IMDb Top 20, holding the #6 (Return of the King), #8 (Fellowship), and #11 (The Two Towers) spots.
In contrast, the recent spinoff series The Rings of Power is an ode to corporate inertia. Amazon, a multi-trillion-dollar company, bought the rights to Tolkien’s appendices, then dropped half a billion to produce a TV show written by the TV-producing industry using all of the standard TV tropes. There were almost no stakes for anyone involved, and even when only 37% of US viewers finished the first season, the money kept rolling in for seasons two and three. As Faramir might say,
“Hollywood made remasters more splendid than any new releases, and counted the names of its IP franchises dearer than the names of any greenfield projects. Soulless producers sat in board meetings musing on demographics, or in high corporate towers asking questions of the A/B tests. And so the art of film fell into ruin…”
Partly to blame is the well-known collapse of the DVD industry. U.S. DVD sales peaked at $16.3 billion in 2005 and were down to $2.2 billion by 2018. That disc money used to let a studio gamble on an odd mid-budget film because even a flop sold at Best Buy next spring. But as the industry transitioned to streaming, it ironically hollowed out that precious revenue stream. Now the only things that studios can risk making are tiny films (low-budget horror still does well) and $250 million franchise entries that aren’t allowed to fail (and thus aren’t allowed to innovate). Neither subgenre has shown the ability to replace the incumbent greats.
Now For Some Asterisks
Now, in fairness to Hollywood, there are a lot of flaws in this analysis. IMDb is not real life, and there are plenty of films being made today that are in someone’s Top 1 or Top 10, even if the rest of the world doesn’t see it that way. And there are some other asterisks to note:
- “But older films have simply had more time to collect more votes!” —It’s true that IMDb’s Top list requires a high minimum vote count, and a film from 1994 has simply had more years to collect votes, so some of this freeze can be attributed to compound interest. Even so, with a healthy film industry we should expect a low but constant rate of disruption to the list instead of steadily declining interest.
- IMDb voters grow up. In 1996, IMDb users were a small crowd of very online film nerds rating whatever they’d seen that month. Today it’s everybody, and everybody agrees on Shawshank the way everybody agrees on pizza. Consensus is sticky.
- The bottom of the list is still alive. 14 of the current Top 250 came out in 2021 or later, including Project Hail Mary from this year. The churn hasn’t stopped completely, but it has been pushed down into the cheap seats.
- The new blood isn’t from Hollywood. Nearly all of the recent arrivals come from somewhere else: India’s 12th Fail (#71), Maharaja and I Swear, plus a steady stream of anime like the Demon Slayer and Chainsaw Man movies. Even if the American film industry is petering out, the rest of the world may still have legs.
- IMDb could die. Also IMDb is just one source, albeit an authoritative one. If it died and everyone had to start voting afresh, we might find disruption and new trends out of the churn.
- Entertainment isn’t dead. The decline of the film industry isn’t the decline of entertainment overall. Viewers are just spending their attention elsewhere, like in China where short-form serials outgross the film industry. But film as an artform is looking more and more like a time-bound medium.
- This is a natural progression. While it might sound shocking to talk about the “greatest films ever” already having been made, consider that it isn’t shocking to talk about the “greatest symphonies ever” already having been made. The heyday of symphony-writing was 250–100 years ago, and aside from a few modern holdouts, people just aren’t writing that many symphonies anymore. Likewise film might just be following a similar trajectory as technology and tastes change.
These are all fair points, but notice that none of them refute the underlying premise: that few seriously believe that any film made recently is better than something on the current Top 10. A great new film might take longer to climb the charts, but the last eighteen years of trying still haven’t produced one climber that stuck. And even if newer films are just receiving fewer votes than older ones, that also points to declining interest in the new products.
Roll Credits
So the odds are that not only has the best movie ever already been made, but the best ten films ever have probably already been made. Soon even the best hundred films ever will have already been made, and nothing new will ever crack the charts again. This is the frozen “final form” that the film industry is sleepwalking into.
There was once a throwaway line in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where a character from the 20th century asks where is the TV, and Data replies that, “That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year two thousand forty.” At the time we all laughed it off, but right now, fresh after watching Ice Cube’s The War of the Worlds, I’m starting to think that Data had a point.
Sources: 28 Wayback Machine snapshots of the IMDb Top 250, 1996–2026
