As the American academy prepares to hand out its Oscars, Hollywood high-flyers prepare for a hangover and the daunting prospect of having to actually do some work. And while a hoard of film enthusiasts tune in and make their predictions, the hardest film nerds anguish in a peculiar corner of the internet. Here, awards mean nothing – do you know a crime film starring Margot Robbie?
If you can, you might enjoy the online version of a classic parlour game. You name a film, and someone else names another film that shares an actor with your film. You respond with another film that shares an actor with their film, and both of you continue taking turns until someone runs out of ideas.
The traditional version is often known as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but the online version has the repellent title of CineNerdle 2. This version allows players to link films using directors and crew, introduces a time limit, and the most popular version gives power-ups to help mitigate a moment of bad luck. If you were cornered in a film-noir rabbit hole, you might play your ‘Escape’ power to flee to another film entirely, or press ‘Skip’ to have the asker answer their own question.
Alongside these power-ups, two films keep popping up over and over, becoming unofficial power-ups themselves. With such an expansive cast, Avengers: Endgame has become a useful standby for panicking players, for obvious reasons. This is a film so stacked with A-listers that Oscar-winner Michael Douglas receives 35th billing, and the range of talent appearing makes it the most-played film on the site.
The second “panic move” is less obvious: Movie 43. If you haven’t heard of this mid-2000s blunder, congratulations. Movie 43 is a teenage “gross out” comedy about teenagers searching the web for the most disgusting videos around. It rates at 4.4/10 on IMDB, 5% on Rotten Tomatoes, and is a stunningly terrible thing to consider.
What is Movie 43?
One of the film’s sketches involves Hugh Jackman playing a man with testes on his chin. Another involves Richard Gere as a CEO selling a sex toy/MP3-player, in an era where MP3 players were still big business. Emma Stone’s role is a bit more dignified, but Halle Berry won’t have enjoyed featuring so large in the trailers.
The list of stars is extensive. At the time, film critic Mark Kermode said: “Putting these stars in these roles just makes you think, ‘somebody somewhere has got some dirt on you, because there’s no other way of explaining your participation in this film’”.
Marketers called it “the biggest cast ever assembled”, but from a CineNerdle perspective, the real strength of the film is how it also contained future talent. Chris Pratt’s name doesn’t even make it onto the poster. Jeremy Allen White, now best known for playing Carmy in TV’s The Bear, is in this film. Kieran Culkin is now known for his roles in Succession and A Real Pain, but between that and Home Alone, he managed to make time for Movie 43.
A range of other notable names feature, but broadly this is yet another terrible teen comedy. Perhaps we should forgive, forget, and move on? For whatever reason, CineNerdle players refuse to, so this reporter has dug the data to answer a question: what makes Movie 43 stand out in an ocean of film?
Or, to borrow from the marketing copy, “What is Movie 43?”.
CineNerdle’s most-played films
First, is this actually happening, or is this all a dream?
No, it really is that noticeable. While CineNerdle 2 has gradually grown in popularity, Movie 43 has been a consistent high-flyer across all five seasons of play, charting at rank 68, 18, 24, 25, and 26, respectively.
Although players have all of film history to choose from, a pool of more modern films frequently rises to the top. The oldest film in the top 1000 is 1958’s Dracula, and only four films pre-date 1970. In contrast, 279 come from the last ten years. In this graph and all that follow, Movie 43 is shown by a red cross.
There are several reasons for this. For starters, there are simply more films made today than ever before, and newer films remain fresher in the minds of players than older ones. The game often incentivises playing modern films through its “win conditions”, which allow players to claim victory by playing several films of a specific description. Games can always be won by reaching a threshold of films released in the current year, helping push new releases up the all-time chart.
Alongside this, the average CineNerdle player is not the average film viewer. Unsurprisingly, the sort of person who enjoys wielding film knowledge as a weapon is also the sort of person who might prefer Little Miss Sunshineto Men in Black– though not by much, it seems.
In many ways, Movie 43 is surrounded by more remarkable films. It was hardly a big earner: in its first week of US release, Movie 43 peaked as the sixth highest-grossing among the takings that week, behind the 11th week of Silver Linings Playbook. It ended up taking more than its budget, but budgets never include marketing costs, so it likely lost money overall.
Interestingly, the most lucrative films all came around the same time, and just below these highest three come Rocky and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. However, these numbers should be read with caution, as budgets and box office can be quite speculative. Because profit figures come from cinema screenings, the least-profitable films on this graph were all TV or streaming movies, where revenue comes in from other means and gives a skewed picture when looking at the numbers.
Also take caution when considering genres. In the zoomed in graph, Toy Story is labelled as “Family”, despite being best known as the first fully computer-animated feature. Similarly, should Titanic be considered a “History” film? In this data, its leading genre is marked as “Drama”, with “Romance” coming second. Defining genres is not a precise art.
There are only four films with the primary genre of either “Music” and “War” in the top 1000, with only three labelled “Western”. Taking all the genre labels into account drastically changes things: only 35 films have their first listed genre as “Thriller”, but 230 films include the label somewhere. Showing all combinations of genres cleanly is impossible, but taking all genre labels gives a good idea of what makes a most-played film.
Plotting each film in all of its assigned genres gives more information on each genre. Here, each horizontal black line represents the median runtime of a genre, meaning the length of the most middle-of-the-pack film. Family films are shorter and more consistent in length than dramas, and Movie 43 seems very average in its length.
But even though comedies can be divisive, Movie 43 stands out as especially terrible.
People tend to remember the good times, so genres such as westerns get a higher average rating as players return to their favourites and forget about the worst of the west. The genres with more entries have greater spreads of good and bad, but there is only one film in the top 1000 that rates worse than Movie 43.
Tom Cruise’s 1998 disaster Cocktail received an average of 12 out of 100 from critics, and sits at 5.9 on IMDb. It might be worst rated, but at rank 329, it has less than half of the plays of Movie 43. A better comparison would be Star Wars Episode I, the red dot sat more than 25 points above it.
This is what makes Movie 43 stand out, and in online spaces, something exceptional tends to be made into more of an exception, just for fun. This is why it has become a meme for players, a joke for streamers, and a stand-out disappointment in a world of better movies. It’s funny to celebrate the bad: A Minecraft Movie taught us that.
It seems unimaginable that anyone is putting Movie 43 forward as something they believe in. As for the film itself? It’s hard to know if we’re societally “past it”, or if we should be. The only thing that seems clear, is that I don’t want to watch it and find out.