A study undertaken by the University of Turin has determined 1939’s The Wizard of Oz is the “most influential” movie of all time, topping 1977’s Star Wars and 1933’s King Kong (via Yahoo).
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The MGM-produced classic, which stars Judy Garland as a Kansas farm girl displaced to a magical land, is the most referenced of the 47,000 movies studied and boasts the most spinoffs.
The study reported nearly 3,000 other movies reference The Wizard of Oz, including references to Dorothy’s famed “Over the Rainbow” and iconic quote “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” which has been directly quoted or referenced in everything from The Matrix to Avatar to Little Shop of Horrors.
The Wizard of Oz has also been adapted in numerous films, television specials, video games, and musicals, including 1978’s Diana Ross and Michael Jackson-starrer The Wiz, 2005’s The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz, 2013’s Oz the Great and Powerful, and in television series Saturday Night Live, Futurama, and Spongebob Squarepants.
“We propose an alternative method to box office takings, which are affected by factors beyond the quality of the film such as advertising and distribution, and reviews, which are ultimately subjective, for analyzing the success of a film,” said Dr. Livio Bioglio, lead researcher on the study.
“We have developed an algorithm that uses references between movies as a measure for success, and which can also be used to evaluate the career of directors, actors and actresses, by considering their participation in top-scoring movies.”
Using an algorithm and data collected from the Internet Movie Database, the study sought to assess how films affect one another, with the results finding “films that inspire other important ones, and for this reason have had a highly influential role in the history of cinema.”
The original Star Wars is second in the top 20, ahead of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ranked sixth is Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which itself inspired C-3PO, the gold-plated nervous protocol droid most famously associated with R2-D2.
1. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
2. Star Wars (1977)
3. Psycho (1960)
4. King Kong (1933)
5. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
6. Metropolis (1927)
7. Citizen Kane (1941)
8. The Birth of a Nation (1915)
9. Frankenstein (1931)
10. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
11. Casablanca (1942)
12. Dracula (1931)
13. The Godfather (1972)
14. Jaws (1975)
15. Nosferatu (1922)
16. The Searchers (1956)
17. Cabiria (1914)
18. Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
19. Gone With the Wind (1939)
20. Battleship Potemkin (1925)
That same process was used to determine the most influential actors, with Samuel L. Jackson (The Avengers), Clint Eastwood (The Mule) and Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible — Fallout) winning the top three spots.
