Hit List: our new Stats for Lists feature reveals top cast and crew, most cinematic years, Oscar-winning genres and more

A close look at our list stats reveals something very special about the year 2017 in cinema.
A close look at our list stats reveals something very special about the year 2017 in cinema.

Exploitation’s trash king. Our rom-com prince of hearts. The official queen of Christmas movies. The single greatest year for coming-of-age cinema. The answers to these and more are revealed through a newly added option for Pro and Patron .

Listen up, film fiends. Our annual subscription sale is now on. It’s your discounted gateway to a Letterboxd experience free of third-party ads. With a Pro or Patron subscription, you also get annual and all-time stats including your most-watched cast, directors and crew, a summary of the countries you’ve watched your way through, your highest- and lowest-rated films and so much more. Plus, there are filter and sort options to help you find something good to watch tonight on the platforms you subscribe to. Patrons can also customize posters and backdrops on their profile, lists and reviews/diary entries, as well as for any film.

Stats. Did we mention stats? We know you love stats, so on top of all the usual data available to Pro and Patron , we have a brand new feature: Stats for Lists. You can now discover a litany of facts and patterns in your own and other ’ Letterboxd lists, such as the breakdown of cast and crew represented across the films in a list. For example, Akira Kurosawa is officially the director with the highest number of films in the Letterboxd Top 250, and by association his regular player Tatsuya Nakadai is the cast member who appears the most.

It’s no competition: Akira Kurosawa is the greatest director according to our Top 250 stats. 
It’s no competition: Akira Kurosawa is the greatest director according to our Top 250 stats. 

If you’re addicted to Christmas movies and feel sure that Lacey Chabert (Mean Girls’ Gretchen Wieners) has been in more of them than any other performer, a close look at the cast stats on the 10,000-plus titles that comprise Julie’s Neverending Christmas list will confirm your suspicions.

This year alone, the queen of Christmas is in Hallmark’s The Christmas Quest and Netflix’s Hot Frosty. Yes, the latter is about an attractive snowman. “He’s the sort of (snow)person I really could’ve used at that time… but he’s also the sort of (snow)person that undoubtedly would’ve annoyed the shit out of me,” says the film’s screenwriter, Russell Hainlines, in his own five-star review.

The Neverending Christmas stats also reveal the late, beloved Ed Asner as a festive film staple. He’s Elf’s Santa, of course, but for a really deep Asner Christmas cut, put Sydney Pollack’s 1965 debut The Slender Thread on your holiday watchlist.

Confirmed Christmas queen Lacey Chabert with Rachel McAdams and Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls. 
Confirmed Christmas queen Lacey Chabert with Rachel McAdams and Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls

While we’re exploring cast stats, have we ever established who the rom-com king of the screen is? Some might guess Hugh Grant. Others, Matthew McConaughey or Adam Sandler. But the stats on Anastasia’s romantic comedy master-list of over 1,000 films reveals that the ageless Paul Rudd officially has the inside edge. Rudd is not always the romantic lead in his fifteen included films, but you can’t fall in love without a great wingman, so he’s both our king, and our prince of hearts.

Fifteen films is chicken feed, however, compared with the 91 exploitation movies Nello Pazzafini appears in according to Andrew’s gigantic Genre: Exploitation list, making the Italian actor the official trash-lord of cinema. Digging deeper into that list’s crew stats, we find three Edgars among the top five “original writer” credits: British sensationalist novelist Edgar Wallace, American sci-fi/fantasy scribe Edgar Rice Burroughs and master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe. Japanese kinkmeister Oniroku Dan and Zatoichi creator Kan Shimozawa complete the quintet.

Beyond cast and crew, Stats for Lists can reveal unexpected themes concerning you and the movies you enjoy. I actually don’t need Letterboxd’s data to tell me that fanny packs are most often worn by characters in action-adventure-comedies (leaving the genre field wide open for a bum-bag of horrors). But it is curious to me that of the films that mention New Zealand, most tend to be explosive, action-packed thrillers containing high speeds and special ops. It’s not always that peaceful downunder, but I guess the sleepy South Pacific life is pretty attractive to a hardened detective pounding the streets or waves of Los Angeles. Meanwhile, my colleague Slim was delighted to find that Willem Dafoe is the cast member to have shown, seen, or simply been proximate to the most “man ass” in (non-X-rated) films.

2017: an excellent year to come of cinematic age. 
2017: an excellent year to come of cinematic age. 

On other ’ lists, you can get the kind of detail that will see you and your quiz-night pals taking the trophy home more often. Movie Maestro’s Chuck Vincent would like a word.

Director Chuck Vincent, summer coming-of-age supremo. 
Director Chuck Vincent, summer coming-of-age supremo. 

So what can you do with all this information? Quite a bit. Hitting “2017” from the Top Years section of the Teenage Wasteland stats will filter the list to that particular year’s films. From there, you can add those titles to a new list and watch your way through the greatest year for hormonal life events on screen.

If you have a Patron-tier subscription, you can discover the friend-approved films on any list faster by scrolling to the “Highly rated with your friends” section of the list’s stats.

You could also win an Oscar for Best Picture. Hear me out: inspecting this Oscar Best Picture Winners list gives you the inside track on the themes and nanogenres you must focus on to get that little gold man in your hands. The Academy loves powerful stories of heartbreak and suffering—with some dazzling vocal performances and delightful chemistry thrown in. (I would also note that there’s a fanny pack in Everything Everywhere All at Once, so…)

Want to win an Oscar? Make sure you’ve got some powerfully heartbreaking song and dance. 
Want to win an Oscar? Make sure you’ve got some powerfully heartbreaking song and dance. 

At the end of the day, a film’s success often comes down to the way it makes us feel. If you want to feel something, really feel something, the best place to start is with Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki, who rules Bel’s impeccable, highly popular “for when you want to feel something” list of 183 titles (at time of writing).

There’s so much more to explore with this new feature and we’d love to hear how you are using it. Get yourself a Pro or Patron subscription, and let us know your favorite factoid on our social channels!


Stats for Lists is available on the web now for paid subscribers, and will be in the next app update for iOS and Android. Our 2024 Pro and Patron sale runs until 3:00am Pacific on Sunday, November 24. Here is the Sale FAQ.

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