Originally published on DropThe.org.
Everybody says movies got worse. Social media repeats it. Film critics lament it. Your uncle at Thanksgiving swears the 1970s were the golden age and everything since has been downhill.
We checked. We have 209,684 movies in our database, spanning 75 years of cinema. Every rating, every genre, every release year.
The data says something nobody wants to hear: movies did not get worse. There are more great films being made right now than at any point in history. The problem is not quality. The problem is that you are drowning in noise and have no idea where to look.
The Numbers That Break the Narrative
In the 1950s, Hollywood and its global counterparts released roughly 213 rated films per year-cluster in our database. Of those, 23% scored 7.0 or higher — the threshold where a movie crosses from forgettable to genuinely good.
Fast forward to the 2020s. Output exploded to 2,111 rated films. The percentage scoring 7.0 or above? 29.8%.
The share of good movies went up. Not by a lot. But it went up. The 1950s produced 49 highly rated films in our dataset. The 2020s produced 629. That is a 12x increase in absolute quality output.
FILMS RATED 7.0+ BY DECADE
1950s
49
23.0%
1960s
62
27.0%
1970s
84
23.7%
1980s
124
22.4%
1990s
229
26.1%
2000s
304
23.8%
2010s
545
24.5%
2020s
629
29.8%
Bar = absolute count of 7.0+ films | % = share of decade total
DropThe Data: Of 209,684 movies tracked across 75 years, the 2020s have the highest percentage of films rated 7.0+ (29.8%) since the 1960s. The 1970s — often called cinema’s golden decade — had the lowest at 23.7%.
The 1970s gave us The Godfather (8.69 rating), Apocalypse Now (8.27), and a permanent place in film school syllabi. But of the 354 rated films from that decade, 27.7% scored below 5.0. The highest bad-movie rate in 75 years. For every Godfather, there were three unwatchable disasters that nobody remembers because they deserved to be forgotten.
The Real Problem: Volume Killed Discovery
In 2000, our database tracked 112 films released that year. By 2024, that number hit 501. In 2025, we are already tracking 675 — and the year is barely two months old.
FILM OUTPUT EXPLOSION: 2015-2025
252
15
249
16
264
17
276
18
291
19
199
20
244
21
277
22
339
23
501
24
675
25
Red = COVID year
Year (20xx) | Count = total films tracked
This is an excerpt. Read the full analysis with charts and data on DropThe.org
About DropThe
DropThe is a data platform tracking 1.83 million entities across movies, games, companies, people, and crypto — connected by 2.18 million knowledge graph links. We don't guess. We count.
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