With the rise of social media and Letterboxd, online film discussion among general-audience movie fans and dedicated cinephiles has become more democratized than ever. But before celebrities and fans were sharing their Top Four films in viral social media clips, the go-to resource for discerning the greatest films of all time, as decided by the public, was the IMDb Top 250.
The Top 250 list is pretty much what it sounds like: the 250 films on IMDb with the highest ratings from “regular voters” on the website (the criteria for who is considered a regular voter haa been kept secret). Those ratings are then collated using a weighted averaging formula that helps to…