Every year, I update my list of my top 100 movies, the Riker Scale. On the list, I rate each movie from 1-100 (79 is the cutoff as of the 2020 edition) and include information such as rating, year and director. Maintaining the Riker Scale has been extremely fun over the years, and it serves as a tremendous reference and source for debates.
In honor of the Academy Awards this weekend, I took a deep dive into the 2020 Riker Scale (which you can find here) and found a ton of interesting tidbits and data, such as:
- In the original Riker Scale (which only had 50 movies), there were zero “R”-rated movies. In the current top 100, there are eight, including four in the top fifty.
- For my top 25 movies, the average Rotten Tomatoes critics score (88.76) was nearly identical to the average Rotten Tomatoes audience score (87.68).
- Higher spots on the Riker Scale did not correspond with better scores on Rotten Tomatoes critic scores, audience scores, or IMDB scores (which is the most useful indicator as it functions most similarly to the Riker Scale).
- The Sandlot (61) had the lowest critic score, while Revenge of the Sith (66) had the lowest audience score. Clearly people do not know their movies.
- Toy Story got a 100 on Rotten Tomatoes. Well deserved.
- The average IMDB score for a top 25 movie was 8.11. The lowest scorers were Chamber of Secrets (7.4) and Black Panther (7.3), while the highest were Shawshank Redemption (9.3) and The Godfather (9.2).
- Except for The Godfather and Titanic, I have seen all of the top ten movies at least three times, with The Incredibles leading the way with 15 viewings.
- In the past 30 years, only one year has not yielded a Riker Scale movie — 2006. 2019 and 2018 led the way, unsurprisingly, with nine and eight movies, respectively.
- The longest consecutive streak of years with at least three Riker Scale movies in each year was from 1999-2005.
- In terms of animation studios, Pixar placed 13 movies in the top 100, while Disney had 5, Dreamworks 3, and Illumination 1.
- Star Wars: The Force Awakens saw its stock drop the most of any 2016 top ten movie the last four years, falling from sixth to 38th. The Dark Knight rose from 40th to seventh.
- Samuel L. Jackson starred in an astounding seven movies (including three of the top four, all in different franchises). James Earl Jones (voice of Darth Vader) beats Jackson (actor of Mace Windu) with eight roles, but was in an acting role in only The Sandlot.
Here are some more awesome facts about the Riker Scale:
As you can see, I’ve done A LOT of schoolwork this weekend 😉 Leave any recommendations down below — they may be Riker Scale material!
Riker's Block 