Even if you haven’t played the IMDb number game yet, you’ll find the fact mine is 69 amusing. What’s the game all about and more importantly – what’s your IMDb number?
Where has this IMDb number game come from?
If you’ve already read about our favourite podcasts, you can add another to the list. This simple game came to my attention through the brilliant Film Fandango podcast where David Reed and Marek Larwood (2 British jobbing actors/comedians) sit down and chat about whatever movie they may have each seen that week. Through this, I have been introduced to some brilliant films that would have passed me by, such as World’s Greatest Dad, Blue Ruin and Superbob. That said, I don’t always agree with them. They also loved Bone Tomahawk, a film which left me cold.
What’s the IMDb number game all about?
Anyway, back to the IMDb number game. As you are all aware, IMDb is the online mecca for all film fans. Millions of people all around the globe are given the opportunity to rate any movies that they see out of 10. IMDb then aggregate these scores and present this as the IMDb rating. So to play the game, you simply go to their top 250 movies and start at the top. You work your way down until you get to the first one that you haven’t seen yet. This is your IMDb number.
What makes this fun is that it changes pretty regularly. For example, Logan has recently popped in at number 55 and La La land spent a couple of weeks in the top 20 until people realised that it wasn’t actually all that.
A fun game that gets you watching quality movies
What it also does is give you a list of what are generally accepted to be really great movies. It is a populist list, not one compiled by critics or movie buffs so Casablanca is down in the 30’s, Sunset Boulevard is in the 50’s and Citizen Kane is in at 77. These are all great movies, but I will be watching The Good, The Bad & The Ugly again before I think about revisiting any of them.
So I am off now to watch Witness for the Prosecution which will bring my number up to the much less fun 78.
