Movies did not get worse. Of 209,684 films tracked across 75 years, the 2020s have the highest percentage of good movies since the 1960s. The problem is volume — output exploded 10x, making great films harder to find.
Everybody says movies got worse. Social media repeats it. Film critics lament it. Your uncle at Thanksgiving swears the 1970s were the golden age and everything since has been downhill.
We checked. We have 209,684 movies in our database, spanning 75 years of cinema. Every rating, every genre, every release year.
The data says something nobody wants to hear: movies did not get worse. There are more great films being made right now than at any point in history. The problem is not quality. The problem is that you are drowning in noise and have no idea where to look.
The Numbers That Break the Narrative
In the 1950s, Hollywood and its global counterparts released roughly 213 rated films per year-cluster in our database. Of those, 23% scored 7.0 or higher — the threshold where a movie crosses from forgettable to genuinely good.
Fast forward to the 2020s. Output exploded to 2,111 rated films. The percentage scoring 7.0 or above? 29.8%.
The share of good movies went up. Not by a lot. But it went up. The 1950s produced 49 highly rated films in our dataset. The 2020s produced 629. That is a 12x increase in absolute quality output.
23.0%
27.0%
23.7%
22.4%
26.1%
23.8%
24.5%
29.8%
DropThe Data: Of 209,684 movies tracked across 75 years, the 2020s have the highest percentage of films rated 7.0+ (29.8%) since the 1960s. The 1970s — often called cinema’s golden decade — had the lowest at 23.7%.
The 1970s gave us The Godfather (8.69 rating), Apocalypse Now (8.27), and a permanent place in film school syllabi. But of the 354 rated films from that decade, 27.7% scored below 5.0. The highest bad-movie rate in 75 years. For every Godfather, there were three unwatchable disasters that nobody remembers because they deserved to be forgotten.
The Real Problem: Volume Killed Discovery
In 2000, our database tracked 112 films released that year. By 2024, that number hit 501. In 2025, we are already tracking 675 — and the year is barely two months old.
Year (20xx) | Count = total films tracked
This is the actual crisis. Not that movies got bad. That there are so many movies you physically cannot find the good ones without help.
Netflix alone releases over 200 original films per year. Amazon, Apple, and every studio with a streaming platform followed the same playbook: flood the zone. Quantity became the strategy because algorithms reward content libraries, not content quality.
The result is mathematical. In 2000, 27 movies out of 112 were good. Scan all 112 titles and you had decent odds of finding something worth watching. In 2024, 124 movies out of 501 were good. Better ratio, actually. But scanning 501 titles to find 124 needles in a haystack? Nobody does that. Nobody can.
Genre by Genre: Where Quality Actually Moved
Animation tells the clearest story. Average rating in the 1970s: 6.52. In the 2020s: 7.31. That is not a small jump. Studios like Pixar, Studio Ghibli, and Laika professionalized the medium. Spirited Away (8.53) in 2001 proved animated films could compete with live-action prestige. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (8.30) in 2023 proved it was not a fluke.
Horror barely moved. From 5.83 in the 1970s to 5.95 in the 2020s. The genre has always been a low-average, high-variance game — most horror films are mediocre by the numbers, but the best ones define entire decades. That pattern held.
Science fiction dropped. It peaked at 6.62 in the 1970s, when The Empire Strikes Back and its era dominated, and sits at 6.46 now. The only major genre to show a meaningful decline. One theory: sci-fi became a visual effects delivery vehicle. When every studio can render a spaceship, the writing has to carry more weight. Not every script can.
Action surged. From 5.94 in the 1970s to 6.55 in the 2020s. The genre grew up. Films like The Dark Knight (8.53) in 2008 and Parasite (8.50) in 2019 — which blended thriller, drama, and social commentary — pushed the entire category forward. Action stopped being disposable.
The Streaming Inflection Point
Between 2015 and 2019, output grew steadily: 252 films to 291, roughly 3% annual growth. Then COVID hit. 2020 dropped to 199 films. And then the dam broke.
2021: 244. 2022: 277. 2023: 339. 2024: 501. 2025 is on pace to shatter every record.
Streaming platforms needed content. They needed it fast, they needed it cheap, and they needed a lot of it. Netflix and Disney led the charge. The playbook was simple: more titles means more watch hours means more subscribers means more revenue.
Here is what that playbook produced. In 2019, 88 out of 291 films scored 7.0+. A 30.2% hit rate. In 2024, 124 out of 501 scored 7.0+. A 24.8% hit rate. The absolute number of great films went up by 41%. But the hit rate dropped by 5 percentage points. More good movies exist. They are harder to find.
DropThe Data: 2024 produced 124 films rated 7.0 or higher in our database — more than any single year in the 2010s. But with 501 total releases tracked, the signal-to-noise ratio dropped to 24.8%, down from 30.2% in 2019.
The Best Movie of Every Era Is Better Than Ever
The ceiling held.
The highest-rated film of the 1970s in our database: The Godfather at 8.69, with 22,444 votes. The highest-rated of the 1990s: The Shawshank Redemption at 8.72, with 29,715 votes. The 2010s: Your Name. at 8.48, Interstellar at 8.47.
The ceiling held. The masterpiece-per-decade rate did not collapse. What collapsed was the ability to culturally agree on what the masterpiece was. When 200 million households are watching different things on six different platforms, there is no shared canon anymore. No watercooler consensus. Just fragmented excellence scattered across an ocean of content.
What the Median Tells You
Average ratings can be misleading. A handful of terrible films drag the mean down. The median — the exact middle movie — tells a cleaner story.
Median rating in the 1950s: 6.14. In the 1970s: 5.90. In the 2020s: 6.50.
The typical movie released today is measurably better than the typical movie released in 1970. Not by a huge margin. But the direction is clear and consistent. The middle of the distribution shifted right. The floor came up. Baseline competence in filmmaking — cinematography, sound design, editing, color grading — is higher now because the tools are better and the talent pool is global.
A competent but unremarkable film in 2024 has production values that would have been considered exceptional in 1985. That baseline shift shows up in the data.
So Why Does Everyone Think Movies Got Worse?
Three reasons, all supported by the numbers.
Survivorship bias. When you think of the 1970s, you think of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Jaws. You do not think of the 98 films from that decade that scored below 5.0. History filters out the garbage. The present does not.
Discovery failure. With 501 films released in 2024, no human can evaluate even a fraction. Algorithms serve you what keeps you watching, not what is best. The recommendation engine is optimized for engagement, not taste. Great films rot in catalogs unseen because no algorithm surfaced them.
Franchise fatigue is real but narrow. The loudest complaint about modern cinema is superhero and franchise dominance. Fair point. But franchise films are a tiny slice of total output. They dominate the box office and the discourse, not the data. For every sequel, there are 20 original films you never heard of. Some of them are brilliant. The Wild Robot (8.31 rating) came out in 2024. Ask 10 people if they have seen it. Most have not.
The Real Verdict
The data across 209,684 films and 75 years is unambiguous. Movie quality has not declined. Movie volume has exploded. The percentage of good films held steady. The absolute number of great films is at an all-time high.
The crisis is not creative. It is logistical. There are 629 highly rated films from just the 2020s in our database. More than the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s combined. The talent is there. The stories are there. The audience just cannot find them.
That is not a quality problem. That is a discovery problem. And it is solvable — if platforms stop optimizing for watch hours and start optimizing for the thing audiences actually want: a good movie on a Friday night, without scrolling for 40 minutes first.
Sources: DropThe.org analysis of 209,684 movie entities. Rating data via TMDB community votes.
