crowdsourced best marvel movie list

After launching a little side project earlier this week to help people determine their list of favorite MCU movies, I realized that the Google Analytics data gave me plenty to analyze, and I started looking it over.

To my surprise (though in hindsight, it shouldn’t have been) almost every response was different, like, practically no overlap among the results. This comes down to the fact that there are over 121 quadrillion ways to rank 19 movies. That’s certainly more than I would have guessed off the top of my head, and it definitely went against my expectation that I’d see a strong set of popular rankings.

How I formatted the list after each quiz made it easy to isolate when a visitor had actually taken the quiz versus being linked to a shared result. I was able to get a set of every solution after both four thousand and five thousand completed responses. After four thousand results there were still a few movies that were somewhat close after averaging the rankings. By five thousand, the order had stayed the same, but the gaps were only widening between all the movies. It looks like a pretty solid statistical point to call this a crowdsourced result.

  1. Infinity War
  2. Thor: Ragnarok
  3. Captain America: Civil War
  4. The Avengers
  5. Guardians of the Galaxy
  6. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
  7. Spider-Man: Homecoming
  8. Black Panther
  9. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
  10. Doctor Strange
  11. Iron Man
  12. Avengers: Age of Ultron
  13. Captain America: The First Avenger
  14. Ant-Man
  15. Iron Man 3
  16. Thor
  17. Iron Man 2
  18. Thor: The Dark World
  19. The Incredible Hulk

I’ve seen a few other ranked lists, but none of them quite jibe with the impressions I’ve been seeing from people online as well as this list. I’m going to go ahead and count this as a successful test, and the idea of turning this into a more generic product for ranking lists of all types is that much more interesting of a prospect.

Update:
With quizzes taken now 15,000 strong, we have seen a bit of a shift in the results. Notably, Black Panther moved up a few places, which seems to make sense based on the response to that movie. Here’s the latest ranking of the people:

  1. Infinity War
  2. Thor: Ragnarok
  3. Captain America: Civil War
  4. The Avengers
  5. Black Panther
  6. Guardians of the Galaxy
  7. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
  8. Spider-Man: Homecoming
  9. Doctor Strange
  10. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
  11. Avengers: Age of Ultron
  12. Iron Man
  13. Captain America: The First Avenger
  14. Ant-Man
  15. Iron Man 3
  16. Thor
  17. Iron Man 2
  18. Thor: The Dark World
  19. The Incredible Hulk

marvel movie ranking

A number of years ago, while scanning photos for our wedding slideshow, I found myself frustrated with the tedious process of manually sorting the photos chronologically. It seemed like it would be simpler to view one photo pair at a time, and apply one of those fancy sorting algorithms I learned in college. I never got around to building that photo sorting utility, but the concept kept rattling around in my head.

In the lead up to Infinity War, my coworkers and I were having a lot of discussions about our favorite Marvel movies. However, seeing the whole list and trying to organize my favorites was overwhelming. This seemed like an easy project to build using my binary sorting concept. The result is a quiz (if you can call it that) taking you through all the films, two at a time, organizing your favorites using the merge sort algorithm. It’s a proof of concept for a larger product that could let you sort lists of any type of objects this way.

You can try the quiz yourself, and even share your result. Here’s mine. Hope you find it fun, let me know if you have any feedback.


@skoda on App.net @technochocolate on App.net