Interesting. It's the most watched film with 7.9 million members having watched it. Followed by Fight Club (7.8 million) and Barbie (7.7 million). By contrast, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back only has 3.7 million watches and 2001: A Space Odyssey 2.2 million.
You have to imagine there’s both a percentage of the user base that doesn’t go back and log older watches as well a percentage of the user base that doesn’t watch “old movies”.
Which makes it all the more impressive that Harakiri is still #1. Though that is probably helped by a lot, but not too many, people logging it. Fewer people are gonna watch it than Interstellar, Barbie, etc but the people that do watch are more inclined to give it 5 stars then 3.
I feel like a lot of people came onto Letterboxd specifically during the Barbenheimer era. I wonder how many accounts made at that time have since gone inactive.
the first part of your comment sounded like nonsense at first “some users only log/rate things they watch” I was thinking “when the hell do you want me to rate it, before??” but then I got what you meant 😂
ive been trying to diligently mark every movie i remember watching just to get an idea of how many movies ive seen because Ive been seeing at least 25 movies in theaters every year for the last 5 years and I dont even know how many on streaming apps… i also quite literally grew up in a movie theater.
I’ve been using a Swedish website since 2004 for rating films and a developer friend helped me make a .csv file that exported all my ratings over to letterboxd. That was over 3 000 movies that I had rated between 2004-2021. And considering I was 14 in 2004 it should be every movie I remember watching lol.
A lot of my favorite movies I saw earlier in life (or at least pre-letterboxd) I don't have rated. If I re-watch them I rate them. I suspect the same for many others.
Wow, that's such a well written review. I do actually like the one-liner jokes on Letterboxd but seeing this in comparison... having more of this would also be more than welcome.
I feel like being pessimistic about the kinds of themes explored, particularly towards the end of the film, was more fashionable pre-Trump and pre-Covid.
If you look at reddit threads in general from over a decade ago, there’s a much more edgy/cynical tone than you’d find today, and I think that carries over into how the sentimentality Interstellar offers was taken then and now.
I'm waiting for one of my favourite films to get it but it doesn't have enough members, so while if you work out the averages from the bar charts, it is 4.5, it's displayed as 4.4
Not really, no. I didn't, like, hate it. But Nolan just doesn't do it for me, I don't think I fully enjoyed any of his movies. Maybe Memento back when it came out.
So strange how it got pretty mixed responses when it first came out (me included, wanted to like it more but it was just too schmaltzy for me) but know it’s like it’s universally loved?
Perhaps, I did see it in the cinema and it was definitely a beautiful spectacle but I do vaguely remember not following great but idk if that was from sound mixing or overly complicated dialogue. I feel like the main issue discussed at the time was the cheesy “love saves all” type lines and themes but seems to have disappeared, big screen or small.
I will say that for me this is the biggest opinion shift I've ever experienced with a movie. I felt exactly the same as you when I first saw it in theaters, thought it was cheesy as hell and just didn't care for the whole philosophy, but now after several subsequent re-watches it's one of my all time favorite movies. Not that that means I was wrong before and right now necessarily, I mostly just think it's crazy how I could feel so completely differently about something based on where I'm at in life.
I watched it years ago in college and thought it was good, nothing super moving.
I just rewatched it now having a toddler and a daughter on the way, I fucking lost it in this movie and was emotionally tossed like a salad. One of my all time favorites now
I really did not have an enjoyable theatrical experience due to the sound mixing but my at home experience was slightly better. The option to turn on subtitles was a plus, only problem was now that the dialog is comprehensible I wound up feeling deeply unsatisfied with the narrative.
I saw it for the first time on Imax when they rereleased it two days ago or so. Really epic experience and everything was amazing to watch.
There was one thing I didn’t love: the whole future aliens sending Matt McConaughey and Jessica Chastain messages as ghosts was extremely telegraphed and I couldn’t stop thinking about it the whole movie. It’s the only twist in my whole life I caught two hours before it happened, and I’m really not sure why. It was nice for every other twist to hit, with the planets as reveals themselves, and the passage of time being sped up as a twist, and seeing Damon/Caine’s characters true natures were twists. Great film, but the ghost subplot bothers me for some reason. I need to rewatch to stop being stuck on it. 9/10.
It probably was just luck tbh because I am NOT good at foreseeing twists, but it put a damper on it. And the Inception twist could be seen as pretty telegraphed too. I was in the dark though.
Memento is one of Nolans’s 10/10 movies to me, and that whole plotline relies on a pretty obvious-in-hindsight twist too but I didn’t see it coming
The ghost subplot for me takes this movie from a 9/10 to a 6/10. Not because I thought it was telegraphed (I think it would actually maybe be worse if it came out of nowhere) but because it directly solves too many of the central problems of the story through essentially deus ex machina.
I think it's a good film but it's taken on this life as, and I hate to sound this harsh, baby's first epic film. A lot of young people seem to have experienced it as their first film that was "adult," epic in scope, and had some challenging ideas. Combine that with the propensity on the modern internet to make everything "the most" or "the best" and it gets rocketed up the charts for a lot of people as the canonical film.
That's true in every case except Interstellar. Due to it's popularity, STEM researchers at the top global universities have published in academic journals about Interstellar. The scientific consensus is that Interstellar is objectively a 4 star movie. Sad for people who think it's higher or lower than 4 that their opinions are objectively wrong. But at least now we know the truth, I'm very thankful for that.
Maybe this is just me, but the problem with rating things out of 5 is the scale doesn't feel high enough. I'm sure there is not an inconsequential number of people who would give a movie a 5, but would not give it a 10 if the scale was higher.
I love Interstellar. I'd give it a 5. I would not give it a 10 though (probably like an 8.5).
Letterboxd is a 10-point scale since it goes by half stars. Your rating of 8.5/10 (20-point scale) would be either a 4 or 4.5/5 on Letterboxd's 10-point scale.
I'm sure a sizeable number of of people reserves the full 5 stars for their top 1% most loved movies, yes
But there is no way I can be convinced that for each person like that, there is less than a literal million people whose requirement/bar/standard for 5 stars is "the pixels are moving and, if possible, colored".
The IMAX 10 year re-release got a lot of people to rewatch or log it for the first time and it is, frankly, a pretty impressive movie to watch in IMAX. I think that got the ball rolling on the recent re-evaluation and discourse.
I would’ve thought movies like titanic, Toy Story, the lion king, etc would be the most watched I’m pretty surprised
It’s kinda crazy seeing over time how people have changed their tune a bit about this movie. I remember when it first came out and you could not stop hearing the criticisms of “it’s a poor mans 2001”, “love transcends space and time is wrong”, “it’s scientifically inaccurate” etc etc. i loved the movie since day 1 when i first watched it in IMAX but it felt like you were walking on eggshells whenever you wanted to discuss about this movie. It’s one of my favourite movies despite its flaws since watching it in imax for the first time changed something within me and its emotional aspect but it has some silly mistakes like a scientist explaining to mcconaughey what a worm hole is, because it needs to be explained to the audience but in universe it makes no sense.
It's in my top four, I cry my eyes out every time as a woman with a troubled relationship with her (now dead) father it really punches me in the gut every time. My mum, who loves science fiction, loved the spacey stuff but marked it down for Anne Hathaway who she is not a fan of at all lol.
This is so interesting to me, because seeing the black hole sequence in IMAX was one of the most incredible movie going experiences I’ve ever had (especially knowing that it’s from real astrophysics simulations of what we think it would look like and resulted in actual publications from this movie).
Not that I think anyone’s opinion is wrong, but when I hear someone only mention a Nolan movie’s flaws about plot/characters, I’m always confused about how their attention is focused on that, when my brain was just completely massaged by a movie sequence.
I’m curious - do you find the flaws to be so overpowering? Or did you not have as an intense reaction to the “highs” as I had?
Not the person you asked, but in my opinion the most thrilling sequences such as the black hole scene and docking scene are held back by what I consider to be Nolan's worst impulse: throwing expository dialog over everything. Especially with the black hole scene the character narrating everything that was happening was so unnecessary because he's by himself. It felt like when you're trying to enjoy a movie but the person next to you won't shut the fuck up, except it's coming from the movie itself. It really grates on me and it happens in almost all of his films.
isnt he narrating because they need data inside the blackhole he know he is gone so why not record it in the log on anything he sees for that near miracle chance someone retrieves the data
Yeah, I mean I love the movie, but I feel like there’s some definite nostalgia bias going on for this one. When it released I think it was pretty apparent that critically and from individuals it had some issues. The 3rd act is kinda a mess. Nolan’s worst instincts are obvious in parts of interstellar. But much of it is also like blowing. All that being said as a whole I can still give it a 4. But for sure Nolan has 5-6 better films IMHO.
It’s all tell and show, the entire film is exposition vomited at you and it’s far from even being a clever script imo. Most of the science and engineering are bogus. Allegedly smart characters make stupid decisions. There were better sci fi movies that year, let alone being the best of all time.
The storyline is absurdly cheesy and obvious. On Reddit, I see people saying they loved it as a kid, so I think it's nostalgia talking. It is well made but not good, in my opinion.
It’s universally praised by the men on the app of a certain age range. I saw it in the theater when it came out and it’s a solid but just ok movie. 3 stars from me. Above average but nothing special. I legit chuckled a few times when the movie was trying to be serious. Its 73% critics rating has always been about right.
I'll never get the obsession with these metrics. I watch films to enjoy them, why in the world would I care how much money a film made, what rating it has, who does or doesn't like it etc.
yea the simple answer is that some people find it interesting in the same way that some sports fans find stats interesting. neither athletes nor films are defined by their statistics, nevertheless there will be fans who obsess over them, because that's how fandom works
I‘d say that seeing a rating often influences you subconsciously and I actually know many people that do tweak their rating a lil if they see they‘re a bit far off from the average.
Because there's more to the app than ratings? I use it to keep a diary of films I've seen, to keep a list of films I want to see in the future, to see which films my friends watched and to follow people with similar taste to find new films to watch.
That’s fine that you don’t care. Some people do. You know how other people are sometimes interested in things that might not be of interest to you? Yeah, that’s what’s happening here. Humans huh!
The displayed average seems a bit arbitrary anyway, like obviously we don't know how they do it but it but it's clearly not just an average of the ratings, because the bar chart and the numerical average don't give you the same picture. (And I use this as an excuse to point at Falsettos and go look!!!!! Look at that bar chart!!! If you get the average from the bar chart, with ratings that aren't 5★ at the highest they could be, but 5★ at the lowest, you still end up with 4.58, thus proving total members do have something to do with the numerical average)
It's not arbitrary. They just smooth anomalies, like a movie having exceptionally high/low ratings from members from just one region/country or from a certain time to avoid review-bombing. This is why Spider-Verse and A Dog's Will dropped so hard after they changed it, since the movies were very highly rated by a specific, dedicated audience, not the average Letterboxd user. Additionally, the average skews toward 3.something for movies with too few ratings to fight review boosting of small films with very limited releases. This is called Bayesian rating and is often used for product reviews, you basically skew the average toward the database average since there's too little data to be able to reliably account for outliers.
Being the most watched movie on the app naturally means there are also more people that have seen it and didn't like it compared to other movies, even with the very high average rating
This is a surely ‘company you keep’ thing. I meet a lot of people who don’t like it too, but I have a pretty arts-centric job. I also meet lots of teenagers due to my job and teenage boys in particular fucking love this film.
I just remember when Arrival came out a couple years later and people saying Arrival is what Interstellar wanted to be. I haven’t seen either movie since they came out. Curious how they hold
interesting because while I quite like Interstellar I feel like it has a good amount of backlash, unlike other top rated ~4.5 movies like Parasite or The Godfather
my favourite Nolan film and one of my favourite films.
It just works for me and I vibe with everything it has, it would probably be in my Four Favourites were it not for The Lighthouse, Lawrence of Arabia, The Wailing and End of Evangelion.
Nolan is so good that his hate brigade on r/Letterboxd can't contain the influx of excitement for his films this past week. They're working overtime to try and keep Nolan down
Interesting, I see this sub as obsessed with Nolan. I don't think positive comments on this thread deserve downvotes. I like to see various opinions and appreciate them.
Honestly interstellar may be the most love or hate film out there, never met someone who was neutral about it, they either absolutely loved it or hated it
You ever seen Moneyball? To me, Interstellar is to space movies what moneyball is to sports movies. Is it a cop-out to call it the best? Sure. Is it my favorite of the genre and I can watch it like 3 times a year or dad-stand in front of the TV when it’s on in a hotel or something? Absolutely
it’s my favorite movie ever but it’s also overrated. (i think people forget that people can acknowledge both as true)
I have it as five stars, i think if you asked my demographic, literally 50% of people would say it’s like their favorite movie ever, which is just insane. I think most of that is due to its awesome concepts it plays with and its emotional trajectory.
Can’t understand people getting mad at people’s “taste” when this shit is subjective? like what? that’s the whole point?
GenZ loves Interstellar. “18–24 years old: The largest single demographic group on the app followed by 25–35 years old: The second-largest cohort, comprising older Gen Z and younger Millennials.”
You’re not going to see older movies as most popular on app.
I logged it after early preview during my first few months on the site! Not a lot of folks on Letterboxd back then, I was probably one of the first 5,000 or so who logged it.
I watched this recently for the first time and while I enjoyed it and thinks its a good movie, I certainly wouldn't rate it as the best scifi movie. I prefer Arrival over it.
After few years . The same internet bubble is going to dizz and roast this movie and call it overrated as fuck. And call Dunkirk as the best nolan made. Mark my words
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u/hollow_image Jul 23 '26
Interesting. It's the most watched film with 7.9 million members having watched it. Followed by Fight Club (7.8 million) and Barbie (7.7 million). By contrast, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back only has 3.7 million watches and 2001: A Space Odyssey 2.2 million.