The Greatest Science Fiction Film Tournament

Science fiction has been around for centuries, and science fiction has appeared on film since 1902. Many website purport to offer lists of the greatest science fiction films of all time. We’re going to produce the definitive list, with your help. Read on for details.

Lists of the greatest science fiction films abound online. In fact, such lists can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. I have catalogued all of those lists, and compiled the choices they made. (Caveat: the IMDB list was viewed on October 18, 2012, and has 1280 entries. I only used the first 225 of them. These lists were chosen because they were the lists that appeared in the first two pages of Google results. I do not claim agreement with the lists; Howard the Duck is included because it was on one of those lists, not because I think it belongs there.) The result: a list of 384 different titles purported to be the greatest science fiction films ever made.

Over the next 24 weeks, Round One will progress. We’re going to serve up lists of 16 films, and our users can vote each film as “above average,” “average” or “below average,” or opt out of voting on films they haven’t seen. Round two will start a week after round one ends. The eight week round will pitch the movies head to head in tournament style brackets, and determine the top 64 films. Then we take another week long break to analyze results, and start round three to find the top 32 films, and so forth. Ultimately, only one film will stand. Round one begins one week from today.

5 replies on “The Greatest Science Fiction Film Tournament”

    • That’s the next stage. Once we’ve got the top 32, we’re going to have the slightly lesser 32 duke to out to pick the top ten of those, and do a series of podcasts discussing those films, writing formal reviews for them if we haven’t already. That stage is probably more than a year away.

    • Serenity is on the list. The fun part of this is that we’ve got a highly subjective definition of “greatest.” Some people will include influence, others won’t. I look forward to the user comments as titles are eliminated along the way. ;)

Comments are closed.