This is a

a scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

If you go by ticket sales, the most popular film of all time is gone with the wind.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give it to him.

That is adjusting for inflation, by the way.

But a movie's take at the box office is influenced by ad budgets, distribution, reviews,

so box office may not be the best measure of a movie's cultural influence.

To address that question, researchers gave movies the big data treatment by analyzing the complex

network of connections among 47,000 movies on the internet movie database,

IMDb. The popular movie site tracks every time a film has been referenced or spoofed,

featured or remade, all factors that indicate a movie's influence on subsequent films.

And by analyzing those connections with a handful of algorithms, including Google's page-rank algorithm, the data scientist came up with a new number one.

It's another 1939 flick by the same directors as Gone With The Wind, which has been spoofed

more than 300 times and referenced by nearly 3,000 movies.

Total? It's The Wizard of Oz.

I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

Dorothy's adventure was followed by the original Star Wars, the original psycho, King Kong,

and 2001, a space odyssey.

The full ranking is in the journal Applied Network Science.

The analysis does have limitations.

It favors older films, and the underlying IMDb data

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