As a follow up to the wildly popular “Hubbert Peak Theory of Rock” article on the decline of rock music (and U.S. oil production), I decided to take the logical next step in pop culture quantitative analysis: Greatest Movies Lists. Only this time, no spurious correlations–just straight up number crunching based on these lists.

UPDATE: I can haz arithmetix? There were some errors in the math in the original draft of this post. Details below.

Did movie quality peak in the ‘60s and ‘70s? Has it all been downhill since The Godfather in 1972? Some statistics you can’t refuse, after the jump.

… if we wanted to entertain ourselves on the internets, we had to make stuff like this.

I can’t believe some admin hasn’t deleted it yet. It’s been, what, five years now? That’s a pretty durable piece of vandalism.