The Princess Bride is currently the highest-rated film on BingeBracket. Not the highest-rated romantic comedy. Not the highest-rated '80s film. The highest-rated film, full stop, ahead of The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Goodfellas, and every prestige drama on the site.
It got there with 80 votes.
BingeBracket is built on a different way to rank films — head-to-head matchups instead of star ratings. It captures things straight ratings miss, but it has its own blind spots. This post is about one of them, and what we're changing as a result.
The Setup
A few weeks ago we ran a bracket with 8 Rob Reiner classics: The Princess Bride, This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men, Misery, among others. To reach more voters, we posted it in two places on Reddit: r/PrincessBride and r/SpinalTap.
The r/SpinalTap post got removed by mods. The r/PrincessBride post didn't, and got 7,000 views and 70 upvotes. Many of those readers also clicked through and voted in the bracket, and naturally most of them voted for The Princess Bride.
It won the bracket comfortably, with about 80% of matchups going its way. And because our ranking system at the time treated all matchups equally, that win rate vaulted The Princess Bride above every other film on the site.
Our #1 film of all time. From 80 votes. Largely from a subreddit dedicated to loving it.
Why This Happened
This isn't a story about The Princess Bride being secretly bad, and it isn't a story about us being bad at math. It's a story about selection bias, and how it makes rankings on every site messier than they look.
When you ask the internet to vote on something, you don't get a representative sample, you get the people who care enough to show up. And those people are usually fans of one of the options. Post a Rob Reiner bracket in r/PrincessBride and it's a pretty good bet that they're going to be Princess Bride enthusiasts and vote for the film they love. The data is real, but it's data about what Princess Bride fans think, not necessarily data about which film is objectively best.
This problem isn't unique to us. Every ranking system on the internet deals with it.
Letterboxd averages reflect who chose to log a film. Films beloved by cinephiles are systematically over-represented; films watched mostly by general audiences get under-counted. IMDb has had famous brigading episodes where coordinated voting pushed films into the Top 250 or out of it, and their weighted rating formula exists specifically to dampen that. Rotten Tomatoes splits critic and audience scores partly because the populations differ in predictable ways.
We're in good company. We're just talking about it earlier than most because we're smaller, the data is more visible, and frankly, it's a funnier story when The Princess Bride is the film breaking your rankings.
But What If The Princess Bride Is Simply That Good?
We're not going to stand here and tell you The Princess Bride isn't a great film. That would be inconceivable.
It sits at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's one of the most quoted films of the last 40 years. It cuts across generations in a way almost nothing else does. People who saw it in 1987 watched it with their kids in 2007, and their grandkids will watch it next year in 2027. It's funny, it's romantic, it's a fairy tale, it's a sword fight, and somehow none of those things cancel each other out. You could spend years building a film that tries to be all of those things and end up with a mess. Rob Reiner showed up, said "as you wish," and made it look effortless.
The Reddit voters weren't wrong about the film. However, they were an unrepresentative sample of voters. The Princess Bride didn't cheat its way to #1. It got carried there by people who love it, which, as anyone who's seen the film knows, is the most powerful force in the universe.
The Fix: Bracket Diversity
The core problem with the Princess Bride result wasn't that the votes were too few. It's that they all came from one bracket, populated by self-selected fans of one specific film. A film with 500 votes from a single Princess Bride bracket would be just as biased as a film with 80.
What we actually need is evidence that a film has been evaluated across different contexts. Different brackets, different opponent pools, different voter populations. So that's what we're requiring.
Going forward, a film will need to appear in multiple distinct brackets before it qualifies for our all-time leaderboard. A film that's only ever appeared in one themed bracket, like a director's filmography or a fan-club tournament or a single-genre grouping, won't be eligible for the global rankings until it shows up in other contexts and proves itself against different fields.
We're starting with a two-bracket minimum because it's the right threshold for our current size. Enough to break the fan-club effect without locking out too many films. As the site grows and brackets multiply, we expect to revise that number upward.
What's Next
If you've read this far, you probably have opinions about The Princess Bride. Good. We've set up a Most Quotable Films of All Time bracket where it can defend its crown against a wider field: The Big Lebowski, Anchorman, The Godfather, Casablanca, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and others. More brackets are coming where Princess Bride can defend its honor. Best Sword Fights in Cinema. Best Fairy Tale Films. Films that got better with age.
Once these changes are in, we hope The Princess Bride keeps its crown. If it really is one of the greatest films ever made, and the case for it is stronger than the methodology snobs admit, it'll defend the title across the new brackets. We're rooting for it — and if the r/PrincessBride community wants to come back and vote it to #1 across multiple brackets, that's a result we'd trust. Have fun storming the castle.
And if you run a film community of any kind (a subreddit, a Letterboxd group, a film blog, a podcast), we'd love to host a bracket for you or discuss what we've learned from our data. The Rob Reiner experiment, even with its statistical problems, was the most interesting data we've generated. We've got a lot more we want to dig into. Get in touch.