The canon
This list is a living, community-validated cinephile canon. Roughly 1,000 films across thirteen decades (1900s through 2020s), each chosen by Letterboxd's per-decade popularity ranking — a function of how many people have watched a film and how highly they rate it.
The site name "1001 Movies" honours the well-known book series of the same name, which popularised the idea of a canonical film list. Our data, however, comes from Letterboxd. The two overlap heavily but not perfectly — we lean more recent and slightly more populist. That's deliberate.
Methodology
We scrape Letterboxd's public per-decade popularity pages monthly, polite and slow. Each decade contributes a number of films calibrated to its canonical density — fewer silents (where many works are lost), more 1970s (the New Hollywood peak), a smaller 2020s while the decade is still in progress. After scraping, every film is enriched with director, runtime, genre, description, and high-resolution poster from TMDB.
How the tracker works
Tap a poster and we record it as watched on this device. We use localStorage — a small key-value store inside your browser. There is no account, no email, no signup. Clear your browser data and your progress is gone, so we recommend bookmarking the share link from the Compare page if you want a way back.
Percentile estimation
The "more than X% of trackers" figure is an estimate based on a smooth curve fit to anonymous progress reports. Most users plateau under 50; very few cross 250. The exact curve we use is 1 - exp(-watched / 120) — meaning hitting 50 puts you at roughly the 55th percentile, 100 at 73rd, 250 at 91st. We will publish a real distribution once we have enough data.
Privacy
We store nothing about you on a server. Posters are loaded from The Movie Database's public CDN. We use Plausible Analytics, a cookie-free analytics service that records page views in aggregate only. No tracking scripts, no ad networks, no fingerprinting.
Affiliate disclosure
On individual film pages, the Find where to stream link goes to JustWatch. If you click through and rent or subscribe, we may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. This is the only revenue source on the site. There are no display ads.
Who built it
Built and maintained by Ashish Chaudhari — software engineer at Amazon, lifelong movie fan. The site grew out of a personal frustration: every other tracker either wanted me to sign up, charged for stats, or was missing the films I cared about most. So I built one that doesn't.
Comments, corrections, and missing-film reports are welcome at hi@1001movies.app.
Not affiliated
This site is an independent fan project. It is not affiliated with the publisher or editors of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. All film posters and descriptions are sourced from TMDB.