Show Time: A Statistical Recap of Filmsplosion 2020

Well, it’s been more than a week since Filmsplosion 2020 came out. Did you get a chance to listen to the whole thing yet? If not, don’t read the rest of this post, as we’ll be looking at all the Nerds’ Top 10 lists.

So, in putting this together, I basically assigned every movie a scored based on where it was on a Nerd’s list. If it was their #1 film, I gave it 10 points; if #2, 9 points; and so on until our #10 films received 1 point each. If it was one of 13 films that appeared on more than one list, then it has a combined score.

(In case you forgot, I did this last year for our 2019 Filmsplosion lists.)

Now, we’ll get to which of those 13 movies had the highest average score, but first, we’ll look at the movies that scored the highest overall.

So, here are your HIGHEST SCORED MOVIES of the Reel Nerds 2020 Filmsplosion:

  1. The Invisible Man (25 points)
  2. Soul (23)
  3. TIE – Trial of the Chicago 7 and Birds of Prey (19)
  4. Bill & Ted Face the Music (15)
  5. Onward (14)
  6. Tenet (13)
  7. TIE – Let Him Go and Wolfwalkers (12)

Of those movies that were on multiple lists, we also had Emma with 10 points, The Wolf of Snow Hollow and The Devil All The Time with eight points each, and 1917 with seven.

Now, The Invisible Man has the highest total score, because it appeared four of the six Nerds’ lists. But, if we look at these films’ average scores (total score divided by number of lists it appeared on), it looks a little different.

So, THE AVERAGE SCORES for our top-scoring repeat films are:

  1. Birds of Prey (8.5)
  2. Soul (7.7)
  3. Bill & Ted Face the Music (7.5)
  4. Onward (7)
  5. Tenet (6.5)
  6. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (6.3)
  7. The Invisible Man (6.25)
  8. TIE – Let Him Go and Wolfwalkers (6)

Personally, I think it’s bullshit that Birds of Prey has a higher score than Soul, considering that the former is a passable superhero film at best and the latter is one of the best movies of the year… but that’s just how I feel about it. (Deja vu, anyone?)

Now, last year, at this point I took a moment to examine how our lists compared to the list of the year’s biggest box office draws. But, because this is 2020 and everything normal is out the window, I’m going to skip that part.

However, one more thing I wanted to examine is how our selected films break down by genre. How many action movies do we have? How many dramas? Super-hero flicks? etc.

So, for this assessment, I went by each film’s most basic genre. Our choices are: animation, action, comedy, documentary, drama, and horror.

And, like last year, I’m also making superhero/comic book its own category because they really are becoming a genre unto themselves, much like Westerns did in the 50s and 60s.

One quick clarification is that over the last year, people online have been pointing out that animation is a medium not a genre, and there are a wide variety of stories one can tell in that medium. You’ve got South Park and then you’ve got Disney’s Beauty & the Beast. I get it, I really do. But, I had it set up like this last year, and I wanted to be consistent. So, when you see “animation” on this list, you can mentally swap it out for like “family/adventure” or what-have-you.

I’m generalizing which category it’s in based on my own experience in either seeing the movie or watching the trailer, and most were pretty straightforward to categorize.

There were a few cases where I was uncertain which genre a given movie fell into. 1917 is one example: Is it a drama? An action movie? In those cases, I went by which genre was listed first on its IMDB page. (FYI: 1917’s IMDB page reads: Drama/Thriller/War. Thus, I labeled as a drama for this exercise.) There were also several dark comedies on the list that got labeled as comedies because that’s what was listed first on IMDB.

So, without further ado, let’s look at the BREAKDOWN OF THE FILMSPLOSION LISTS BY GENRE:

  1. Drama (10)
  2. Comedy (9)
  3. Animation (6)
  4. Action (4)
  5. Horror (3)
  6. Documentary (2)
  7. Superhero (1)

Dramas lead once again with Comedies still runner-up, but Animation did much better this time while Superhero did worse compared to last year’s break-down. Not surprising, considering some superhero movies slated for 2020 were pushed to this year.

Thanks to Brad, I put all the Nerds’ Filmsplosion lists below so you can see for yourselves which genre I categorized each movie as (or which one IMDB listed first).

Give the lists a look, in case you forgot what everyone picked. I also think looking over everyone’s lists by genre is very interesting, as you can see some Nerds lean more on one genre than others. Again, not a bad thing — just something to take note of.

And, if you remember for the episode, James’ list is a little eccentric…

Corinne

  1. Weathering With You – animation
  2. Soul – animation
  3. Wolfwalkers – animation
  4. Tenet – action
  5. The Trial of the Chicago 7 – drama
  6. Emma – comedy
  7. 1917 – drama
  8. The Gentlemen – action
  9. The Personal History of David Copperfield – comedy
  10. Over the Moon – animation

Zach

  1. The Invisible Man – horror
  2. Mank – drama
  3. Bill & Ted Face the Music – comedy
  4. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – drama
  5. Soul – animation
  6. The Trial of the Chicago 7 – drama
  7. Da 5 Bloods – drama
  8. The Wolf of Snow Hollow – horror
  9. Extra-Ordinary – comedy
  10. Color Out of Space – horror

Henry

  1. Boys State – documentary
  2. Never Rarely Sometimes Always – drama
  3. The Hater – drama
  4. Feels Good Man – documentary
  5. Palm Springs – comedy
  6. Onward – animation
  7. King of Staten Island – comedy
  8. Another Round – comedy
  9. The Devil All the Time – drama
  10. Emma – comedy

Ryan

  1. Let Him Go – drama
  2. Birds of Prey – superhero
  3. The Invisible Man – horror
  4. Scorpion’s Revenge – animation
  5. The Devil All the Time – drama
  6. The Wolf of Snow Hollow – horror
  7. Freaky – horror
  8. Extraction – action
  9. The Way Back – drama
  10. Hubie Halloween – comedy

James

  1. The Last of Us: Part II – video game
  2. Onward – animation
  3. The Trial of the Chicago 7 – drama
  4. “Everything is Spiritual” by Rob Bell – book
  5. The Invisible Man – horror
  6. The Outsider – TV series
  7. The Queen’s Gambit – TV series
  8. Emma – comedy
  9. McMillion$ – TV series
  10. Sonic the Hedgehog – action

Brad

  1. Birds of Prey – superhero
  2. Onward – animation
  3. Soul – animation
  4. Bill & Ted Face the Music – comedy
  5. Tenet – action
  6. The Kid Detective – comedy
  7. Wolfwalkers – animation
  8. 1917 – drama
  9. Let Him Go – drama
  10. The Invisible Man – horror

Well, that’s all I had, folks. Hope you enjoyed this statistical breakdown of the 2020 Filmsplosion episode! 🙂