A look at overall average Rotten Tomatoes scores from 65 different directors

    So, over the past couple weeks I have been compiling a list of 65 movie directors and averaging out each of their movies’ RT scores. The procedures goes like this: I average the critic and audience scores for each movie, then average those out. I also got the average scored of each director’s first and last three films, but I’ll keep this post about the overall averages.

DISCLAIMER:

    I did this for fun to see who was the "best" director according to Rotten Tomatoes. As such, there is a lot of missing data (particularly with the likes of John Ford, Yasujirô Ozu, and Uwe Boll for some reason) that will definitely throw off the scores, along with directors that have directed too few movies to measure in the first place. In addition to both of these, shorts and documentaries were not counted, which will definitely affect the scores of people like Charlie Chaplin or Werner Herzog. So obviously this is not the best way to determine who the best film director ever is at all, but it’s interesting nonetheless. The format used will be Director Name with Scored over Scored Films/Total Films. Directors I feel had their scores thrown off by lack of data, lack of movies, or their focus on documentaries or shorts, will be marked with a superscript 1, 2, or 3 respectively. So, without further ado, here is the list in order of highest to lowest:

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1. Yasujirô Ozu¹ with 93.46% over 13/48 films

2. Andrei Tarkovsky with 92.79% over 7/10 films

3. Hayao Miyazaki with 90.95% over 11/12 films

4. Ben Affleck² with 90.83% over 3/3 films

5. Charlie Chaplin³ with 88.95% over 11/12 films

6. Orson Welles¹ with 88.35% over 10/14 films

7. Stanley Kubrick with 87.23% over 13/13 films

8. Christopher Nolan with 86.72% over 9/9 films

9. Sergio Leone with 86.50% over 7/7 films

10. Akira Kurosawa¹ with 86.25% over 26/31 films

11. Edgar Wright² with 86.13% over 4/5 films

12. Quentin Tarantino with 84.94% over 9/10 films

13. Jeff Nichols with 84.30% over 5/5 films

14. J.J. Abrams with 83.90% over 5/5 films

15. Wes Anderson with 83.31% over 8/8 films

16. Alexander Payne with 83.25% over 6/7 films

17. Denis Villeneuve with 83.14% over 7/8 films

18. Taika Waititi² with 82.88% over 4/4 films

19. Spike Jonze² with 82.75% over 4/4 films

20. John Ford¹ with 82.03% over 29/116 films

21. Matthew Vaughn with 81.60% over 5/5 films

22. Brad Bird with 81.00% over 5/5 films

23. Alejandro G. Iñárritu with 80.83% over 6/6 films

24. Martin Scorsese with 80.67% over 23/23 films

25. Kar Wai Wong with 80.55% over 10/10 films

26. Paul Thomas Anderson with 80.43% over 7/7 films

27. Joel & Ethan Coen with 80.12% over 17/17 films

28. David Lynch with 79.95% over 11/12 films

29. Ingmar Bergman¹ with 79.52% over 29/36 films

30. David Fincher with 79.15% over 10/10 films

31. Darren Aronofsky with 78.50% over 6/6 films

32. John Lasseter with 78.40% over 5/5 films

33. Steven Spielberg with 77.74% over 29/30 films

34. Roman Polanski with 77.68% over 19/20 films

35. James Cameron with 76.69% over 8/8 films

36. Peter Jackson with 76.42% over 13/13 films

37. George Lucas with 76.00% over 7/7 films

38. Charlie Kaufman² with 75.75% over 2/2 films

39. Mel Gibson with 74.80% over 5/5 films

40. Guillermo del Toro with 73.61% over 9/9 films

41. Alfred Hitchcock with 73.30% over 51/54 films

42. George Miller with 73.22% over 9/9 films

43. Werner Herzog³ with 72.17% over 18/19 films

44. Adam McKay with 71.75% over 6/6 films

45. Woody Allen with 71.45% over 46/46 films

46. Tim Burton with 71.31% over 18/18 films

47. Terry Gilliam with 70.88% over 12/12 films

48. Clint Eastwood with 70.47% over 34/35 films

49. Lars Von Trier with 70.33% over 12/13 films

50. Mel Brooks with 69.41% over 11/11 films

51. Francis Ford Coppola with 67.70% over 22/24 films

52. David Cronenberg with 67.69% over 21/21 films

53. Spike Lee with 66.98% over 22/23 films

54. Ridley Scott with 66.68% over 22/23 films

55. Michael Gondry with 65.81% over 8/8 films

56. Zack Snyder with 62.50% over 7/7 films

57. Guy Ritchie with 62.13% over 8/8 films

58. Luc Besson with 57.96% over 14/15 films

59. Michael Bay with 53.92% over 12/12 films

60. Michael Cimino with 53.14% over 7/7 films

61. Michael Crichton with 52.33% over 6/6 films

62. M. Night Shyamalan with 49.00% over 10/11 films

63. Roland Emmerich¹ with 45.96% over 12/17 films

64. Paul W.S. Anderson with 39.20% over 10/11 films

65. Uwe Boll¹ with a whopping 14.14% over 7/29 films

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    Essentially, this is not a measure of who is the best director, but who is the most consistent crowd-pleaser. People with a lot of scored movies tended to be more toward the middle even if they are widely considered to be some of the best directors of all time (cough Alfred Hitchcock cough Martin Scorsese cough) because they're more likely to have some misses in their career. People with fewer movies tend to be higher in the list for the same reason. Francis Ford Coppola and Luc Besson had some of the most disappointing careers in history. And, of course, Uwe Boll has an abysmally low score.

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    I might make an update on this in the near future, so if you have any other directors you'd like me to add, feel like to comment them!

Submitted November 21, 2016 at 09:15PM by Curtis542 http://ift.tt/2fUuxfR