Edgar Wright Somehow Finds the Time to Make a List of His 1,000 Favorite Films

What are your ten favorite movies of all time? While it isn’t the easiest question to answer, odds are that a few contenders pop immediately to mind; if we gave you an hour or three to weigh each title carefully, you might even be able to put together a list that makes you reasonably happy. But what if we asked you to put together a list of your favorite 100 movies? What if we asked you for a thousand? It’s the sort of thing that could become all-consuming, keeping you from watching any new movies (let alone making them).

Somehow, as crazy as it sounds, that is exactly what Edgar Wright has done. The writer-director partnered with video streaming and fan community website MUBI to put together a meticulous list of each of his top 1,000 movies.

Helpfully structured in chronological order, the list begins with 1922’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and ends with Nicolas Winding Refn’s current release, The Neon Demon. And while Wright does omit his own titles for the list — that means no Shaun of the Dead or Scott Pilgrim vs. the World for those hoping to see Wright take a bold stand with his own work — taken as a whole, the list does seem to inform the playfulness and intelligence that is present in each of Wright’s own films. Not every filmmaker, even with 1,000 slots to choose from, would include a movie like Starship Troopers in his final count.

While nothing can compare to a list of movies that counts all the way to a thousand, this is not the first time that Wright has curated a list for websites aimed at cinephiles. Back in 2011, Wright put together a list of his ten favorite Criterion Collection titles for the distributor’s website, helpfully providing a write-up of each title and the influence it had on him as a filmmaker. With Martin Scorsese heading into what has to be the final phase of his career, and Quentin Tarantino inching closer to his arbitrary ten film cut-off, it seems that Edgar Wright is angling for the position of Hollywood’s reigning faculty practitioner.