What started out as an informal question during some “watercooler time” at the Executech office, has become an important piece of Executech culture. The innocent question was “How do you rank the Star Wars films from best to worst?”. You’ve probably had similar conversations at your office, and we wanted to put the question to a more formal, scientific test.
We took a “random” sampling of 17 Star Wars fans around the office and asked them to rank their favorite Star Wars movies. Some of the rankings might surprise you.
We also wanted to go the extra mile and be extra thorough in our polling, so we asked two more questions; What are the best lightsaber fights, and who is your favorite Star Wars character.
We’ve combined the results of these questions with some other rankings to give you the definitive list of Star Wars rankings, according to the Executech office. We also gave a brief overview of these rankings on our latest episode of Between the Bytes. Check it out!
Ranking The Best Star Wars Movies (Scored)
We assigned a score to each rank. There are 9 movies so the number one spot gets 9 points and so on. Total of 144 points possible.
Coming in first place is (not a huge surprise) Episode 5! Episode 5 ranks #13 on IMDB’s top 250 movies. Second place is Episode 6 and there’s a surprising tie between Episode 4 and the newest movie, Episode 8: The Last Jedi. No surprises on the prequel trilogy ranking, however.
Best Star Wars Movies (Average Rank)
We took the average of the assigned rank position (1-9) for each movie.
In this format, Rogue One creeps up to be very popular it was ranked very highly in everyone’s rankings.
Ranking the Best Lightsaber Fights (Score)
We had the participants assign a score from 0-100 for each lightsaber scene across all 9 movies. Mild spoilers ahead.
A surprising win for the most recent fight of the series with Rey, Kylo vs Guards. Three of the top five fights are all from the new movies. It could be a sign of things to come. The graph does not show the full list of fights, just the top 10. To see the full list with video link click here.
Most Controversial Lightsaber Fights (Score Disparity)
Not everyone agreed on the fights. Some thought very highly of a fight, while others strongly disliked it.
The next chart graphs the standard deviation in the fights. Yoda vs Dooku was by far the most controversial, followed by Yoda vs Palpatine. Yoda divides the fans more than we thought!
Favorite Star Wars Characters
Some of the most iconic heroes and villains come from the Star Wars movies. But which ones will the Executech fans like the most?
We have two datasets in this graph. We took the average rank given to a character and the number of times that character appeared on someone’s list. This sample was from only 8 employees so a character could have appeared 8 times. Vader and Han Solo both appears 7 times on people’s lists. Luke edged out to get the best average ranking position. The original gang rules supreme; Luke, Vader, and Han.
Best Critics Reviews (Metacritic + Rotten Tomatoes)
For comparison, we took a look at what the critics scored the 9 movies.
Star Wars Movie Earnings (Opening/Domestic)
It’s interesting to see how much money this franchise has made over the years. Check it out.
That’s all the rankings, for now. We hope you enjoyed our nerd-filled survey results. Now we want to know, what’s your ranking? Help us make this extremely scientific and serious survey even better. Submit your list of Star Wars movie rankings to [email protected].
