A film can be great without being particularly re-watchable. Everyone should see Citizen Kane, but it’s not a movie you just pop on and chill out with. It’s not a film where you quote along to it. Rewatchability is a separate metric, and it’s usually a metric of how a film is not only entertaining, but how it stays with us as opposed to being disposable.

The stats wizards over at FiveThirtyEight wanted to figure out the most rewatchable movies of all-time. They ran a SurveyMonkey Audience poll and asked people to list the five films they consider the most rewatchable (I didn’t say this was the most scientific approach). They got back 4,362 entries from 1,169 respondents, and noted:


Some entries covered several films — “The Godfather movies,” for instance — and I combined these into a single entry referring to the series as a whole, rather than give these respondents a disproportionate number of votes. Some responses were a little unclear: For example, if someone simply entered “Star Wars” — as about 9 percent of respondents did — I’m not sure if that meant 1977’s Episode IV or the whole series, but I counted it separately from the people who did specify the whole series. I’m not a mindreader, so that’ll just have to do.

star-wars-episode-iv-a-new-hope-image
Image via Lucasfilm

So how did it all break down? Here’s the Top 24 most rewatchable films or series of all-time:

1.) Star Wars

2.) The Wizard of Oz

3.) The Sound of Music

4.) The Lord of the Rings (series)

5.) Gone with the Wind

6.) The Godfather

6.) The Princess Bride

8.) The Shawshank Redemption

9.) Harry Potter (series)

10.) It’s A Wonderful Life

11.) Forrest Gump

11.) Grease

13.) Dirty Dancing

14.) Pulp Fiction

14.) Titanic


the-lion-king-blu-ray-image-2
Image via Disney

16.) The Lion King

16.) Pretty Woman

18.) Casablanca

19.) The Matrix

19.) The Notebook

21.) Star Trek

21.) Finding Nemo

23.) Goodfellas

24.) Pride & Prejudice

25.) Caddyshack

25.) The Avengers

Star Wars topping the chart by a decisive margin (it received 98 submissions compared to the 72 received from The Wizard of Oz) doesn’t surprise me. What surprises me is Gone with the Wind ranked so high. It’s just shy of four hours long and you feel every single minute of it.  Also, it shows its age, especially with regards to race, and yet that doesn’t seem to have affected it at all in terms of the 52 people out there who like to sit back, pop on four hours of Civil War drama, and unwind.

Click on through to FiveThirtyEight to see the number of submissions for each film as well as a breakdown of submissions by gender.


gone with the wind poster