The word “favorite” almost always measures something subjectively. People have favorite cars, favorite foods, favorite cities, and even favorite relatives. The opinion becomes important when it relates to items people can buy or services they can pay for. Companies spend millions of dollars a year trying to identify people’s tastes because the information can be a key to commercial success.
24/7 Tempo has compiled a list of America’s favorite movies of all time, ranging from the 1940s to the present day, using ratings and audience scores from Internet Movie Database and Rotten Tomatoes. From this list, we picked the one movie that did the best based on our yardsticks. The No. 1 movie is “The Shawshank Redemption.” Based on a Stephen King novella, it’s the story of Andy Dufresne, a banker sentenced to life in prison for murders he didn’t commit. In prison, he befriends a fellow prisoner and outwits a corrupt system. The movie was a box-office disappointment when it was released in 1994, but was liked by critics and has become a cult classic since.
Here are some details on “The Shawshank Redemption.”
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
> IMDb rating: 9.3
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 98
> Domestic box office: $63.4 million
> Starring: Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Bob Gunton, William Sadler
To determine America’s favorite movie of all time, 24/7 Tempo reviewed information from IMDb, an online movie database owned by Amazon, and Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator, calculating an index based on the movies’ IMDb rating and Rotten Tomatoes audience score, weighted by the number of IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes votes. Only films with at least 400,000 reviews on either site were considered. Data on domestic box office came from The Numbers, an online movie database owned by consulting firm Nash Information Services. Data was collected March 2021 to May 2021 and is not adjusted for inflation. Cast information comes from IMDb.
Click here to read America’s Favorite Movie of All Time
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