The Best Movie You've Never Seen

It’s hard to measure a movie’s popularity or how many people have seen it in the age of streaming. At one point, theater ticker sales were a good proxy. Highly successful movies brought in over $100 million. Then, there was the question of whether international ticket sales should be included. With the rise of VHS, people bought cassettes or could rent movies from Blockbuster. Movies moved to premium TV services like HBO. Movies were even played on airplanes. Finally, streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix have tens of millions of subscribers. Who measures viewership of movies on those platforms. And these services make movies of their own, and don’t just offer movies made by studios.

Additionally, there are some movies highly regarded by critics and film reviewers that are less well known. In certain cases, they may only appeal to a specific subset of audiences or they may be too downbeat to excite the masses. Other times, they may simply have been overlooked for reasons such a lack of widespread distribution — a challenge generally alleviated by streaming technology.

To aid viewers in discovering the best movie you’ve never seen, 24/7 Tempo has looked at rated films on user-based websites Rotten Tomatoes and Internet Movie Database that have comparatively few total user ratings.

Many of the films we looked at had relatively small budgets and may have simply been overlooked during this age of big budget blockbusters. Among the talented individuals behind some of the movies on the list are Oscar-nominated directors.

Other movies we considered may have been overlooked because they were never released to theaters. Those who have seen them have generally loved them. However, their viewership has thus far been limited.

To determine best movie you’ve never seen, 24/7 Tempo reviewed data on audience rating and popularity from Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb. Movies with between 10,000 and 50,000 IMDb audience votes were ranked based on their Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score as of August 2021. Only films made in 1950 or later were included in the universe, and documentaries were excluded. Supplementary data on cast and director also came from IMDb.

Ink (2009) is the best movie you’ve never seen. Here are the details:

> Starring: Christopher Soren Kelly, Quinn Hunchar, Jessica Duffy
> Director: Jamin Winans
> IMDb rating: 6.9/10 (21,167 votes)
> RT audience rating: 81% (6,147 votes)
> Tomatometer rating: 100% (06 votes)

“Ink” is a sci-fi movie about a mysterious creature that steals a little girl’s soul and her father’s fight to save her from a world of supernatural beings.

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