The most influential movie of all time, according to science
If I were to ask you to name the most influential movie of all time, you would probably come back with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather or Orson Welles’ magnum opus, Citizen Kane; that is, assuming you’ve read this first paragraph before scrolling down to find out.
Of course, such questions encounter pockets of subjectivity, and there are many factors of varying significance to account for. I certainly couldn’t venture an empirical answer, but I wouldn’t put it past the scientists to take on the challenge.
In 2018, a pair of research boffins, Livio Bioglio and Ruggero G. Pensa, devised a data model to determine the net influence of a movie as a quantitative reading. This way, something previously qualitative and incomparable could now be ranked; what many of us might deem conjectural, these scientists aggregated.
Before we continue, please take a pinch of salt from my ample supply. As my fellow hyper-rational readers will agree, it’s impossible to determine the movie that has had the largest influence since the very first, Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion. Beyond the study’s recreational value, Bioglio and Pensa can’t be far off with these convincing results.
The pair published the findings of their extensive study in the Applied Network Science journal. In the report, they discerned the most influential movies of all time by “accounting how much [a movie] has influenced other movies produced after its release, from both an artistic and an economic point of view.”
“For each movie, we also collect data on its year of release, genres and countries of production to analyse trends and patterns in the film industry according to such features,” Bioglio and Pensa add in the report. “We also collect data on 20,000 directors and almost 400,000 performers (actors and actresses), and we use the network of references and our score of movies for evaluating their career and for ranking them.”
Falling somewhere between arbitrary and absolute, the report determined that The Wizard of Oz, as directed by Victor Fleming in 1939, was the leader of the pack. Adding conviction to the findings, the competition wasn’t even close.
Bioglio and Pensa focussed strictly upon influence within cinema and found that a myriad of subsequently influential movies had been directly or indirectly influenced by Fleming’s adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel. Remarkably, the study doesn’t even take Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ into consideration.
Star Wars, Psycho, 1993’s King Kong, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Metropolis, Citizen Kane, The Birth of a Nation, Frankenstein and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs follow in that order to complete the top ten. Orson Welles fans out there may feel hard done by, but The Wizard of Oz ostensibly took the top slot for its potent and eternal impact on popular culture and its groundbreaking use of Technicolour technology.
It’s important to note that the top 20 most influential movies were all released before 1980, the latest being Star Wars which debuted in 1977. Indeed, later movies, such as James Cameron’s Avatar, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction or Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, have made similar impressions, but age favours cumulative influence.
Watch the trailer for The Wizard of Oz below.
