The Best Movie Of 2021

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 12, 10:53AM EST

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The movie industry almost had its back broken during the COVID-19 pandemic, at least so far as the theater sector goes. Big movies chains, led by AMC Entertainment, came close to bankruptcy. From 2015 to 2019, the annual domestic box-off total was over $11 billion. That cratered to $2.1 billion in 2020, and almost all of it was in the first 10 weeks. The sector barely recovered in 2021 as the box office hit $4.5 billion. “Spider-Man: Now Way Home”, was the only movie that grossed over $500 million as it took in $573 million over the course of the year.

The part of the industry that grew from streaming video, begun barely a decade ago, exploded upward. Netflix and Amazon added tens of millions of subscribers. Disney+ was launched with great success. People, forced to stay home, often binged on hour after hour of shows as they had little else to do. The trend allowed companies like Amazon to build “studios” with budgets as large as those of traditional players like Warner Bros. The trend went so far that movies produced by streaming companies started to win major awards like Oscars.

The other unexpected development of 2021 was that studios and streaming companies started to release expected blockbusters in theaters and online at the same time, causing controversy and more than one lawsuit from producers and stars.

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To determine the best movie of 2021, 24/7 Tempo developed an index using average ratings on IMDb, an online movie database owned by Amazon, and a combination of audience scores and Tomatometer scores on Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator, as of December 2021. All ratings were weighted equally. Only movies with at least 2,000 audience votes on either IMDb were considered. Directorial credits and cast information comes from IMDb.

The best movie of 2021 was Spider-Man: No Way Home. Here are the details:

> IMDb user rating: 8.9/10 (307,635 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 98% (25,000 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 94% (358 reviews)
> Directed by: Jon Watts

Click here to read The Best Movies of 2021

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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.