The greatest ensemble cast in cinema history, according to science
Have you ever looked at a movie poster for the latest blockbuster or Oscar hopeful and been captivated by the sheer volume of famous faces in the cast? Aside from the imagery on a poster, which is obviously incredibly important, the list of cast members that a film can boast about on its one-sheet is also vital. Many posters these days simply have a horizontal list of heavy hitters along the top, and studios bank on audiences reading these names and thinking, “I’m in!” How often does a stacked cast actually translate to box office success, though, and when analysed through the cold, hard lens of science, which movie has the greatest ensemble cast in history?
So, first things first: how does one quantify how great a cast is? Well, that’s where the ever-reliable Daniel Parris of Stat Significant comes in. He devised a foolproof method that involved analysing the six top-billed actors in any ensemble production by crunching the numbers on each one’s five most recent releases. To ensure his analysis of quality wasn’t just based on box office, though, he also looked at casts with the highest number of career Oscar nominations between them. After all, movie posters prominently include ‘Academy Award winner’ or ‘Academy Award nominee’ beside relevant names, so Oscar success is still a byword for prestige to audiences.
To make things fair, Parris also separated his analysis into two categories: Best non-sequel casts and Best sequel casts. Thanks to the modern proliferation of mega-franchises like Marvel, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Fast and Furious, this was a necessary evil – and it threw up some interesting results.
When Parris analysed the best casts for original movies, the top five included Les Miserables, Oppenheimer, Dark Waters, and American Hustle. All these films starred numerous Oscar winners and nominees, many of which were also a part of several highly bankable pictures at the box office.
The number one non-sequel cast, though, was Knives Out, which was toplined by Daniel Craig and Chris Evans, who have been in multiple billion-dollar James Bond and Avengers/Captain America movies. Jamie Lee Curtis’ 2018 Halloween reboot also added to the pot, while Christopher Plummer was nominated for an Oscar for 2017’s All the Money in the World.
Intriguingly, when it came to analysing the greatness of an ensemble cast solely based on Oscar nominations, the top five looked very different. Instead of huge blockbusters or starry murder mysteries, it included prestige pictures like Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte from 1964, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner from 1967, and the 2015 effort Suffragette.
The cast with the biggest number of Oscar nominations in history, though, is the forgotten 2013 theatre adaptation August: Osage County, which boasted an enormous 24 nominations. Admittedly, 21 of those came from Meryl Streep alone, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Julia Roberts, and Chris Cooper also contributing one each. Interestingly, though, Parris found that the more Oscar nods a cast amassed had very little impact on box office takings.
Whatever the case, neither of these films features the greatest ensemble cast in cinema history. Instead, that honour is reserved for Avengers: Endgame, the all-conquering blowoff to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s famed ‘Infinity Saga.’ That unwieldy behemoth of a superhero blockbuster included so many big names in its cast that Parris couldn’t analyse them all, so he had to narrow his focus to the six core Avengers who first appeared on-screen together in 2012.
The movie’s top-billed star was Robert Downey Jr, a then two-time Oscar nominee – now three-time – whose previous five movies had all raked in billions at the box office. Admittedly, four were previous Marvel pictures, but at least The Judge also pulled in a respectable $100 million in 2014. The other stars – Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, and Mark Ruffalo – also contributed a ton of previous Marvel box office and a further five Oscar nominations between them.
So, there you have it. Even without taking into account the box office and Oscar exploits of other Endgame stars like Brie Larson, Don Cheadle, Bradley Cooper, Josh Brolin, Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael Douglas, Tilda Swinton, and Robert freakin’ Redford, Endgame still used science to trounce every other ensemble movie in cinema history.
