One of the things that always fascinates me about the movie dueling site is how many users it has, considering that I don't usually hear people talk about it outside of the actual Flickchart groups I participate in on Facebook. I assume a lot of people tried it once and maybe a sizeable percentage never went back, leaving the account created and contributing to the site's stats, but with no new activity in a dozen years. I also assume that the diehards like me, still ranking nearly 15 years after first discovering the site, are comparatively few.
But just how many actually tried it at one point is still pretty astonishing.
I don't have the actual numbers, but I can make general determinations of size through the circumstantial evidence of how many people have a particular movie as their #1.
On each Flickchart movie page, it shows how many users have this movie ranked #1. There are some really weird results. Recently I was adding 80 for Brady, and I noticed that one user had the movie as their #1 of all time. I later discovered that this person had only 20 movies, all 2023 releases, and 80 for Brady was actually their #5.
So there may be some glitching going on here. But for the purposes of this post I'm going to assume that most of the stats I'm about to give you are legit.
On Friday I was really bored at work -- it was really slow -- and I decided to see how far I had to go on my own personal chart before I found a film that no other Flickcharters had ranked #1. It took me longer than I thought, all the way down at #51.
Here are my top 50, with the number of Flickchart users who have the movie as their #1 listed afterwards in parenthesis:
1. Raising Arizona (49)
2. Back to the Future (2140)
3. Pulp Fiction (3227)
4. Raiders of the Lost Ark (2121)
5. Citizen Kane (521)
6. Star Wars (3478)
7. Toy Story (1328)
8. Fargo (900)
9. This is Spinal Tap (55)
10. The Iron Giant (66)
11. The Princess Bride (1372)
12. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1357)
13. Goodfellas (1612)
14. Tangled (62)
15. Jesus Christ Superstar (1)
16. The Cable Guy (14)
17. Children of Men (203)
18. Say Anything ... (20)
19. Bound (5)
20. Do the Right Thing (32)
21. Run Lola Run (108)
22. WarGames (11)
23. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (50)
24. Donnie Darko (885)
25. Unforgiven (205)
26. When Harry Met Sally (73)
27. The Shawshank Redemption (3382)
28. Defending Your Life (3)
29. Time Bandits (5)
30. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1023)
31. A Fish Called Wanda (26)
32. Ghost (24)
33. Big (190)
34. Vanilla Sky (111)
35. Four Weddings and a Funeral (13)
36. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (10)
37. Die Hard (1038)
38. Lost in Translation (691)
39. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (1647)
40. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1025)
41. The Empire Strikes Back (3748)
42. Adaptation (108)
43. Galaxy Quest (47)
44. The Exorcist (511)
45. Elf (244)
46. Dumb and Dumber (583)
47. Election (16)
48. Starship Troopers (321)
49. Schindler's List (959)
50. Rabbit Hole (2)
And finally ...
51. Flirting With Disaster (0)
I did not continue to see when I'd get the next zero.
In case you weren't doing the math, that's the #1s of 35,622 Flickchart users crammed just into my personal top 50.
And this isn't even considering all the Flickcharters who have beloved films like Casablanca, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Wizard of Oz, Sunset Boulevard, Gone With the Wind and countless others as their #1. (Two of these come shortly after the top 50 on my chart. The rest are farther down.)
Simply put, there are a lot of Flickchart users out there.
Now I know I have some popular choices in my top 50. Thirteen of these movies appear as the #1 movie for more than one thousand Flickcharters. But this top 50 is not just chalk. Bound, for example, is nothing like a household name, yet a full five Flickcharters consider it their favorite movie of all time.
Why no love for Flirting With Disaster, when so much other love is being spread around?
Helpfully, the page for each movie shows how many users have it in their top 20, and there are 18 of those for David O. Russell's 1996 film. (I mean, who am I to complain -- they have it higher than I do.)
But it's just interesting that when so many different movies are someone's favorite -- even 80 for Brady, or so it would appear to someone who wasn't investigating too closely -- that any movie as good as Flirting With Disaster would have no ultimate champion out there in the Flickchart community.
I don't know what point I really have with this post or the observations within. I think I was just bored on a slow Friday.
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