This Is the Best Action Movie Ever Made

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Action movies date back more than a century. “The Great Train Robbery,” made in 1903, has been pegged as the first action film. Action films have worked their way into other genres, in particular Westerns, starting in the 1930s, like John Wayne’s “Stagecoach” (1939). Action movies are also highly visible in American Film Institute’s 100 Best Movies of All Time, where “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) holds the seventh place.

No matter when it was made, almost every action movie has a plot in which a hero or a hero-in-waiting encounters a series of dangerous challenges while trying to fight against a villain or evil force. By the end of the film — most of the time — the hero has prevailed. Crazy car chases and spectacular explosions are also common to the genre.

To identify the best action movie ever made, 24/7 Tempo reviewed the 1,196 films in the action genre that had at least 25,000 reviews on Internet Movie Database, an online movie database owned by Amazon, or Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator. We calculated an index of each action movie’s IMDb rating, Rotten Tomatoes audience score, and Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score, with all ratings weighted equally. To provide context, each movie’s ranking out of the 17,276 movies in our database across all genres was also included. Data on domestic box office came from The Numbers, an online movie database owned by consulting firm Nash Information Services. Ranking context for domestic box office gross was also provided out of the 4,230 films for which data was available. Box office figures are not adjusted for inflation. Cast information comes from IMDb.

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“The Dark Knight,” released in 2008, is the best action movie of all time. Here are some of the details:

Combined score: 2.9 — #13 highest out of 17,276 movies in all genres
> Starring: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine
> Domestic box office gross: $533.7 million — #15 highest out of 4,230 movies in all genres

Click here to read These Are The Best Action Movies Ever Made

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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