Best Movie of the 2010s: The Official Bracket

WELCOME! The first bracket is here! After all this time, we’ve got the 64 best movies of the 2010s. Let me just take a second to tell you all about how we got here: In March 2020…well, you know what happened. We realized that we were stuck in an 800-square foot condo with a puppy and a LOT of newfound time on our hands. While thinking about possible ways to spend time together without driving each other insane, Tom and I combined our love of movies with the freshly cancelled March Madness tournament. Our search to find the “best” movie of all time was born.

While we loved the idea, it was just that—an amorphous, unplanned idea. Over the next few days, we researched and made a list of movies that were award winners, new cult classics, and big box office hits from the 2010s. The list ballooned to a few hundred films, and our goal was to make sure that BOTH of us saw each and every one of them. Fourteen months, lots of writing, and a ton of screen time later, we did it! From our list of over 200 films, we narrowed it down to the top 64. This was really hard! We had to cut quite a few films that we absolutely love, but that’s showbiz, people.

We put our top 64 movies into a hat and picked them out at random to form our first match ups. We will go through each match up individually, choosing our favorite to move on based on pretty much no criteria (flying by the seat of our pants here) and if we don’t agree on a pick, we will go by the family and friends vote on Instagram. By the end of our little tournament, we will have a winner of our Best Movie of the 2010s! Then, we will start the process all over with our next decade: the 2000s (Shrek gang stand up).

If you want to play along with us, we have a printable/desktop editable bracket! You can fill one out, send it to our email mpmbracket@gmail.com, and the person who gets the closest to our winning bracket mayyyyy get a surprise in their Venmo account. It’s basically us bribing you to talk to us about movies. If you want to participate, please fill out the bracket with your picks, and send us an email by Tuesday, June 1, 2021 at noon. It’ll be fun!

Okay! Ummmm, that’s it I think! Welcome friends! We are really excited, and also, if you don’t know us, please please please don’t be mean to us if you don’t agree with our movie picks or if you think we left something out. We love you <3.

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• Rules:

  1. We made it so we had to take a minimum of 4 movies per year. Why? I dunno. Seemed fair. We make the rules. It was ROUGH for a couple of years but whatever. There was no seeding because we thought that the winners would be obvious if we picked all the #1 seeds! We went with a random draw instead and ended up with some brutal early matchups.

  2. Each region is named for our favorite movie theaters - Regal Burlington 20, AMC Hamilton 24 (RIP), Princeton Garden Theatre, and Mega Movies at Brunswick Square Mall (RIP - now an AMC).

  3. You guys can vote on EVERYTHING @motionpicturemadness on IG when we post the matchups. As we said above, we pick the winners, but if we disagree it goes to the popular vote, so it’s important you have your voices heard, just like the Barden Bellas on the non-bracket-making Pitch Perfect —> Tom wrote the rough draft of these rules but I edited them, can you tell?

  4. Squarespace’s mobile functionality isn’t great, so if you’re on your phone and can’t see the bracket clearly - check it out here.

  5. 1) Word doc 2) PDF <— This is where you can print/edit (on desktop/laptop) your own brackets! Again, if you want to join us in the fun, you can fill out your picks, and send us your brackets at mpmbracket@gmail.com! When you send the email, let us know the winners of your Final Four (the matchups are the winner of Regal region vs. winner of AMC region; winner of Princeton region vs. winner of Mega Movies region) and the tournament champion! We will send a prize to the winning bracket!

  6. We want to give a HUGE thank you to our friend Mike Clark, who designed our bracket template and a few other pieces that are so helpful and integral to our project. Mike, we are obsessed with you and your “gRaPhIc DeSiGn is my PASSION” skills. Seriously though…your work is so impressive and lovely.

  7. Enough out of us, here is the 2010s bracket at long last:

Well, that’s it! Stay tuned for the first matchups and get your brackets in! And follow us!