The Year of a Bunch of Totally Solid Movies
An informative look by the Black List’s Terry Huang at the movies of 2014:
It’s a sentiment that has been expressed enough to seem worthy of note:
2014 perhaps wasn’t the best year for movies.
When thinking about this year in comparison to other years and in particular last year, which had both Gravity and 12 Years a Slave, should we feel shortchanged?
Well, first off, we need to distinguish two things when deciding our definition of a “good” year for film.
1. The actual quality of films released. Were there fewer good films released this year? How do the “best of the best” stack up against previous years (Oscar contention)? Was there an abundance of bad films? Was it a year of more mediocre movies?
2. The perception of the quality of films released. This takes into account the same variables above, except we need to add an element of how well publicized, distributed, and/or patronized the good movies were compared to the bad movies. Collectively, were bad movies more present than good ones? Were people simply unaware of the good films?
The Best of the Best
In our collective memory years from now, we’ll probably only remember the greats. So it’s worth exploring, independently of all the junk, the most highly-rated films of the year. This won’t tell us overall the quality of film, but it will tell us if this year produced films that will filter into our future canon.
For this analysis, I’ll be using Metacritic as a proxy for quality of film.
Why use Metacritic over Rotten Tomatoes? Basically, Metacritic answers more granularly “how good” the movie was, not just what percent of critics liked it. It also favors more established, well-regarded critics. There’s a long explanation you can check out, and you can also reference Metacritic’s own explanation of how they calculate the score. I’m not saying it’s better; it just tells you something slightly different.
Why use Metacritic instead of anything else? Well, mostly because it already exists, it broadly tracks movies, and we’ve all heard of it, so we have a common reference point.
Let’s just look at the Metacritic scores of the top 10 films by year, regardless of how widely distributed they were.
2005200620072008200920102011201220132014#110099969794999595100100#2939894949495949410095#392919292929490929795#492919291899289929792#590909189899189909691#689899086889088889491#788898986889087879490#888898885878887879390#987898885868887879389#1087888884868887879289Average90.691.390.888.989.391.589.389.995.692.2
So looking at the “best of the best,” this year was actually the second highest scoring year in the last 10 years, right behind 2013. That sounds like a pretty strong year for film! 2013 was an exceptionally strong year (the average is 3.4 points higher than 2014). Coming off 2013 probably skews our perspective a little about the quality of 2014.
I’ve been telling people the same thing: We’ve had a couple of years with some superior movies. For 2014, Boyhood, Birdman, Selma, Whiplash, Nightcrawler, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, Edge of Tomorrow, Interstellar, The LEGO Movie, Gone Girl, The Fault in Our Stars are movies that easily spring to mind. I’m sure I’ve forgotten several others.
For all you numbers people, check out the rest of Terry’s post here as he really gets granular re the movies of 2014.
Twitter: @terrykhuang.
Check out the Black List blog here.
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