Netflix is the clear winner when it comes to streaming movies. The service has an impressive selection of both new and old films, as well as TV shows and documentaries. Hulu also offers a wide variety of content, but its selection is not as extensive as Netflix’s. Amazon Prime Video is a close third, with a good selection of recent films and TV shows. However, it doesn’t have nearly the number of older titles that Netflix or Hulu do. ..
Streaming services can easily stuff their libraries with junk to pump up their numbers. This is why it’s easy to get lost scrolling through titles looking for something worthwhile to watch. We wanted to find out which service has the best movies.
RELATED: The Big 6 Streaming Video Services—What Does Each One Offer?
The Research
The first thing we need to do is decide how to determine what makes a movie “good.” Thankfully, there are a plethora of movie reviews on the internet. For our purposes, we’ll be using Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb.
For Rotten Tomatoes, we’re using the “Tomatometer”—it’s the average score from film critics. Movies rated above 60% are “Fresh,” and those above 75% are “Certified Fresh.” We included both of those in our results.
IMDb’s system is much easier. Movies are rated on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the best. To match Rotten Tomatoes, we included all movies rated 6/10 or better in our results. This data was collected from JustWatch.com.
The Results
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the data. We’ll start by seeing how many of the “best” movies are available on each service, according to IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes ratings. Then we can compare that to the total library size to figure out which service has the highest percentage of quality movies to watch.
The results are comparable between both IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, though IMDb seems to be more generous in how it rates movies. The one exception is Netflix, which is fourth by RT reviews, but second by IMDb reviews.
The Math
Let’s do some math. We can take the number of movies we’ve determined are the “best” and compare that to the total size of each service’s library. That will tell us what percentage of the movies available are actually good movies.
HBO Max might be the overall winner. It has a healthy library size and a solid percentage of highly-rated movies. In the future, HBO Max will be merged with Discovery+, and the new combined service may get a new name.
Which Streaming Service Has the Most Movies?
