Have you ever wondered how many movies are made every year that are really worth watching? What is the maximum number of TOP titles that the TOP list for a certain year could/should contain?

Of course, tastes differ, we don’t all like the same actors/actresses, directors, genres… In fact, there are many factors that influence which titles end up on someone’s top list. Consequently, it is impossible for everyone’s list of favorite movies for a given year to be the same.

In order to come up with an approximate number, I had to start by spending a ‘little’ free time and scrolling through numerous top lists, in order to more easily remember as many films as possible from the mentioned period. Then I spent a ‘little’ more time to form my top lists from those titles.

The largest number of films that I enjoy were made in the period between 1990 and beyond, that is, in the previous 3 decades. In addition, I give priority to films with famous Hollywood actors, which further implies that my TOP lists will contain mostly Hollywood titles.

Honestly, I thought that I would easily make a TOP 100 list of popular (and in my opinion the best) movies for each year individually, but that turned out to be impossible.

In my opinion, 50-60 is a realistic number of titles, which every film lover can choose as truly excellent in one year. 1/2 or 1/3 of that number will probably be common to all viewers, while the rest of the films on the list will depend solely on subjective choice.

Guided by that number, we come to the conclusion that if we start (again) to watch only those (subjectively best) titles, and only one per a day, we would have enough interesting films for 4-5 years, without watching a single new one that comes out. So many great ones have been recorded in the past 3 decades.

A small note: the gold titles from the ’80s are left out of this story for one reason only – they will get a separate chart. Despite the fact that the ’80s were full of great, memorable titles, their number is significantly lower than the average ~50 per year.

As for movies older than the ’80s, they are not interesting to me and I don’t watch them (of course, with the exception of a few cult classics like ‘Alien’, ‘Hair’, ‘Godfather’ and ‘Godfather 2’, ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘The Deer Hunter’, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’…).