The Screen of the Metros
Metro areas ranked by the film industry they raised: a century of top-grossing films, era-normalized so 1939 counts like 2024, credited to directors and billed casts, mapped to the metros that made them — with every Academy Award nomination since 1929 layered on as prestige.
1,385 films · 12,137 Oscar nominations across 98 ceremonies · 5,416 people · updated 2026-07-25, refreshed after each ceremony
Leading figures
People & directors →Where the movies come from
Every filmmaker rolls up from their home metro to a country. 90 countries are scored, led by United States and United Kingdom. Each has its own profile: the talent it raised and the canon films set on its soil.
The all-time films
All 250 →Blended: critical standing, audience, box office and longevity.
Year by year
Browse by decade →The top ten at the box office and the night's big Oscar winners, for every year since 1920 — the whole century, decade by decade.
The Academy
Charts →Best Picture winners were top-ten grossers 100% of the time in the 1970s — and 0% in the 2010s. The great divorce, plus where the Academy's nominees are born.
How the Screen rankings work
The base pillar
The top ten grossing films of every year since 1920 (Wikipedia's year-in-film tables, which cite Box Office Mojo and The Numbers). Each year distributes a fixed 100 points by gross share, so eras compete on dominance, not inflation. Pre-1930 years are discounted — silent-era box office reporting is fragmentary US rentals.
Who gets the credit
A film's box office goes 25% to its director and the rest down the billing order, with later films in a long career counting less, so the prolific no longer crowd out a brilliant few. Two more pillars sit alongside it: Academy prestige and audience acclaim from TMDb, each normalized and blended.
The prestige pillar
Academy nominations since 1929, win-weighted and restricted to the marquee categories (picture, directing, acting, writing, cinematography), so craft, shorts and honorary awards no longer crown the list. Data: the open oscar_data project (BSD-2), joined via IMDb identifiers. Films rank separately on their own four-pillar blend.
The metro connection
People are attributed to metros by birthplace, resolved deterministically through Wikidata, with editorial overrides where someone is really 'from' somewhere else — Spielberg is Phoenix, not Cincinnati. Vague or rural birthplaces stay unattributed rather than guessed.