What Are the Most Influential Films in Movie History? A Statistical Analysis
Which films forever changed the entertainment industry?
Intro: E.T. and Mac and Me
In 1982, Steven Spielberg's E.T. became the highest-grossing film of all time, blending coming-of-age drama with family-friendly science fiction to redefine the modern blockbuster. For entertainment executives, the success of E.T. offered two key lessons:
Produce More Movies Like E.T.: Family-friendly magical realism emerged as a lucrative new subgenre ripe for replication.
Product Placement Pays Off: E.T. famously showcased Reese's Pieces in a pivotal scene, triggering a reported 65% increase in sales for the candy and demonstrating the financial potential of integrating brands into storytelling. 🤮
Out of this blind devotion to trend-chasing came Mac and Me, arguably the most cynical movie ever produced—a film notorious for blatantly imitating E.T. with several identical plot points:
A stranded alien befriends a young boy
The alien hides in the boy's home and is discovered by his family
Government agents pursue the alien
But Mac and Me didn't stop there. Attempting to replicate E.T.'s Reese's Pieces showcase, the film shamelessly promoted McDonald's and Coca-Cola—product placement so brazen that its alien protagonist, MAC (short for "Mysterious Alien Creature" and conveniently also shorthand for McDonald's), is literally revived by drinking a Coke. A few scenes before that, Ronald McDonald appears and performs an elaborate dance sequence inside a McDonald's. Audiences loved seeing E.T. eat candy—so surely they'd enjoy seeing a knock-off alien guzzle Coke while Ronald McDonald breakdances, right?
Few movies epitomize Hollywood's copycat tendencies more vividly than Mac and Me, a film so outrageously unoriginal that it endures as an ironic pop culture curio. Though an extreme case of corporate excess, this film illustrates how the relentless pursuit of commercial trends often dictates movie development. Films are the product of creative inspiration and calculated commercial strategy, interpreting yesterday's successes to create something new (but not too new).
So today, we'll quantify entertainment's most influential films, the relationship between commercial success and cultural legacy, and the cult gems that continue to influence despite contemporaneous obscurity.
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What Are the Most Influential Films in Movie History?
A movie's influence can be gauged by the network effects it produces. These externalities are wide-ranging and may include:
Continued employment for that movie's actors and filmmakers.
Increased financial investment for the filmmaker's next project.
Imitation by other directors and screenwriters.
Imitation by studio executives (i.e., Mac and Me).
Canonization on "best of" lists.
Winning movie awards and setting box office records.
To quantify the network effects generated by a given movie, we'll use Wikipedia backlinks—the number of times a film is referenced on other Wikipedia pages (globally).
For example, when E.T. is mentioned on the Wikipedia page for Mac and Me, it counts as a reference to Spielberg's masterpiece; similarly, if Wikipedia notes that Stanley Kubrick inspired Christopher Nolan, that counts as a reference to Kubrick.
As with all metrics, this one is far from perfect, though it offers a directional understanding of a film's impact on the broader industry (and, sometimes, on matters outside of entertainment). So, according to Wikipedia, which movies hold the greatest influence? According to our backlink metric, this distinction belongs to Star Wars, Titanic, and, quite surprisingly, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
If you're baffled by this result, know I'm equally confused. Is Who Framed Roger Rabbit more influential than Jaws, Citizen Kane, or The Wizard of Oz? Depends on how you define influence, I guess.
Ultimately, Roger Rabbit's vast web of Wikipedia citations is driven by a few anomalies specific to this film:
Groundbreaking Special Effects: Who Framed Roger Rabbit was formally innovative for its seamless blending of live-action and animation.
Iconic Cameos from Famous Cartoons: The film includes cameos by iconic animated characters such as Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Donald Duck, Betty Boop, Goofy, Tweety Bird, Porky Pig, and Dumbo, among others. The film is subsequently backlinked on the Wikipedia pages for these characters—and the same goes for Space Jam.
Revitalized Disney: The film's success rekindled public interest in Disney animation (which had suffered a recent string of flops) and is widely credited with spearheading the Disney Renaissance—a period of creative and commercial revitalization that led to classics like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King.
Critical and Commercial Success: Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a critical and commercial success, grossing over $351 million worldwide and winning four Academy Awards.
This final point is crucial to our analysis, as box office heavily shapes a film's influence alongside several other key factors. Ultimately, the most frequently cited films on our list tend to fall into a few identifiable categories:
Highest Grossing Films of Their Era: The Birth of a Nation (1910s), Gone with the Wine (1930s), The Godfather (1970s), Star Wars (also 1970s), Titanic (1990s), Avatar (2000s), and Return of the King (2000s) were all incredible box office triumphs in their time. Many of these films spawned franchises or were part of an ongoing series.
Inspired Real-Life Extremist Groups (Sometimes Inadvertently): The Birth of a Nation motivated the reformation of the K.K.K., while The Matrix birthed the "red pill" metaphor, which was adopted by several online groups.
Featured Live-Action Looney Tunes: Both Space Jam and Who Framed Roger Rabbit feature animated rabbit protagonists alongside cameos from various Looney Tune characters.
Won Best Picture: Titanic, The Godfather, Return of the King, and Gone with the Wind won several Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
While this initial collection is a helpful starting point, the outsized influence of box office led me to adopt a different approach: selecting the four most frequently cited films from each decade to better capture influence over time.
This group should have greater resonance for movie nerds, though our highest-ranked films still correlate strongly with box-office success—perhaps more strongly than I'd like.
There must be films that changed the movie industry without grossing $200M, right? Can we quantify the relationship between box-office performance and cinematic legacy—and then use this knowledge to highlight exceptional films that defy this trend?
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Which Films Are Influential Despite Weak Box Office Performance?
When evaluating a movie's legacy, it's tempting to dismiss commercial performance as a confounding variable. Money shouldn't dictate a film's lasting cultural significance—or at least, that's what some would prefer. The reality is that movies require considerable financial investment and are deliberately crafted to generate maximum profit, making box office undeniably significant. Consider all the cinematic trends that have come and gone: spoof movies, teen sex comedies, 3D spectacles, erotic thrillers, Chuck Norris action flicks, torture-porn horror movies, Smell-O-Vision, and Disney live-action remakes (which, inevitably, will fade away). Each trend arose to capitalize on perceived audience demand—sparked by the success of earlier films—and dissipated once the money faucet ran dry.
To better understand the impact of commercial success on cultural legacy, I measured the direct relationship between Wikipedia references and inflation-adjusted box office, constructing a regression model based on these two variables.
Unsurprisingly, there's a strong correlation between these two factors (r=0.57). What a revolutionary find—money drives decision-making in the entertainment industry. Truly groundbreaking stuff.
Yet this find isn't absolute. Some films defy this relationship, influencing filmmakers and executives despite meager commercial success or outright failure.
To identify films that endure despite weak commercial performance, we'll apply our regression model to estimate each film's "projected box office" based on its Wikipedia citation count. We can then compare this "projected box office" figure with the movie's actual revenue.
Consider this example calculation:
Movie Wikipedia Citations: 1,000
Actual Movie Box Office: $20M
"Projected Box Office" Based on Count of Wikipedia Citations: $100M
We can then calculate the difference between that movie's influence ("Projected Box Office") and the money it made at the time of its release:
Difference Between Influence ("Projected Box Office") and Actual Box Office: -$80M
Percent Difference Between Influence ("Projected Box Office") and Actual Box Office: -80%
When we rank films whose Wikipedia influence far exceeds their box office performance, our resulting list includes many of my all-time favorites—Cinema Paradiso, Mulholland Drive, Requiem for a Dream, and Blue Velvet, among others.
Is this our definitive list of cinema's most influential films? Not quite. But this approach spotlights movies whose impact has endured independent of commercial performance. Consider this group another piece of an unanswerable puzzle.
Every film highlighted in this analysis deserves to be part of the conversation—perhaps the joy lies more in debating cinematic influence than reaching a definitive answer. But I will firmly insist on one point: Who Framed Roger Rabbit is probably not cinema's single most influential work, despite the sheer number of Looney Tunes featured in this movie.
Final Thoughts: The Rise and Fall of Found Footage Films
In 1999, The Blair Witch Project convinced the world that three twenty-somethings had vanished in the backwoods of Maryland and that Hollywood had somehow recovered footage of their final days. The film's marketing campaign turned this illusion into a viral sensation, drawing audiences in droves to what felt like a real-life snuff film.
The unprecedented success of Blair Witch gave rise to a wave of imitators, as Hollywood began churning out dozens of "found footage" films. Movies like Paranormal Activity, Rec, and Cloverfield capitalized on audience enthusiasm for this style until the novelty wore off in the early 2010s, causing the found footage film to go extinct.
In hindsight, the flood of found footage movies from the 2000s seems quaint—why would anyone want to watch a film that induces motion sickness? Yet, to those alive during this era, it appeared horror moviemaking might forever be dominated by shaky camerawork and mysteriously discovered VHS tapes.
Recognizing a cultural fad in real-time is challenging, yet these tropes always seem obvious in hindsight. This leads me to an intriguing thought experiment: Which current filmmaking trends will ultimately prove fleeting? What if Marvel, king of all intellectual property, is just a passing fad? 😱 What if, thirty years from now, I have to explain to my children that superhero movies were genuinely great for about a decade until everyone grew tired of them—and from that point onward, every new superhero release became an exhausting referendum on the state of cinema? 😱😱 Perhaps The Avengers was once a highly influential movie, but its influence came with an expiration date.
A film like Mac and Me may seem cringeworthy now, but at the time, audiences were simply craving another dose of Spielbergian wonder—and brands saw an opportunity to turn America's children into loyal Big Mac eaters and Coke drinkers. As long as entertainment remains a for-profit industry, audiences will continue to be served films that relentlessly chase yesterday's success—until the money faucet runs dry and Hollywood moves on.
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