The 8 Most Fun Movies of the 20th Century, Ranked
Some movies do not really age because they never relied on novelty in the first place. You hear the opening music, see the first shot, recognize the first stupidly perfect line, and your brain is already there. No warming up. No convincing yourself it still works. You are in. Think of the film Tag. A cast of serious actors like Jeremy Renner, Jon Hamm, Annabelle Wallis, and more but what are they doing? One is a high-end journalist and two of them are adults, highly successful adults who can’t stop playing tag and would go to any lengths to tag their friend.
That is the kind of fun this list is chasing. Movies with scenes you wait for even though you know exactly when they are coming. Movies that make adventure feel easy, comedy feel effortless, and movie stars feel like movie stars. The kind where one person says “put this on” and suddenly nobody is leaving the room. These are the 8 most fun movies of the 20th century.
8 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' (1986)
Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) wakes up, decides school is not happening today, and somehow turns avoiding attendance into a full-scale operation involving fake illness, hacked records, a stolen Ferrari, a parade, and one increasingly broken best friend. Ferris Bueller's Day Off understands the fantasy perfectly. Ferris is not just skipping class. He is treating one ordinary weekday like the world personally owes him an adventure.
The movie keeps finding little pleasures instead of chasing one huge plot. Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck) staring at Seurat in the museum. Ferris hijacking a parade and singing “Twist and Shout.” Principal Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) getting destroyed by almost everything he touches. Even the Ferrari becomes less about the car than what it means to Cameron and his father. Ferris can be smug enough to annoy you, but the movie has enough affection for Cameron to keep the whole thing grounded. It is still dangerously effective at making responsibility look like something you could maybe ignore until tomorrow.
7 'Ghostbusters' (1984)
New York is being overrun by ghosts, and the people saving it operate out of a converted firehouse, drive around in an ambulance, and treat supernatural catastrophe like another badly managed small business. Ghostbusters could have played the premise as horror. Instead, it behaves like four exhausted guys discovered the afterlife had billing potential.
That tone is everything. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) flirts through hauntings. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) discusses terrifying science with complete calm. Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) is so excited by the paranormal that even bad news sounds fun. Then the movie gives you Slimer inhaling room service, the library ghost, possessed Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver), the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and a final battle that feels enormous without losing the comedy. Even the proton packs are irresistible because they look dangerous enough to violate several laws before anyone turns them on. The whole thing has the loose confidence of people who know the joke and never need to explain it.
6 'The Princess Bride' (1987)
A grandfather (Peter Falk) sits beside a sick child (Fred Savage) and starts reading a book the kid clearly expects to hate. Then there are pirates, sword fights, giants, poison, torture, revenge, miracles, and enough romance that the boy eventually stops complaining about the kissing.
That framing gives The Princess Bride its highest potency. It knows exactly how ridiculous fairy tales can be and loves them anyway. Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) has spent years preparing one line for one man. Fezzik (André the Giant) rhymes while fighting. Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) turns choosing between two cups into an intellectual crisis. Miracle Max (Billy Crystal) treats resurrection like an inconvenient customer-service request. Westley (Cary Elwes) and Buttercup (Robin Wright) keep the adventure sincere enough that the jokes never flatten it. You can quote half the movie, but the reason it remains so lovable is simpler. Everybody in it is having exactly the kind of adventure you secretly wanted stories to contain when you were ten.
5 'Jurassic Park' (1993)
The first time the dinosaurs appear, nobody is running. Nobody is screaming. Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) just looks up and sees a brachiosaurus moving across the landscape, and for a few seconds Jurassic Park lets the impossible be beautiful. Mainly because it has to hook both adults and kids at that very moment. And then it becomes a terrible management decision.
That balance and pacemaker is why the movie is so ridiculously rewatchable. You get the sick triceratops and the wonder of seeing dinosaurs alive, then the T. rex walks out into the rain and everything changes. The vibrating cup of water still tells you more than a wall of dialogue ever could. The velociraptors in the kitchen remain pure childhood terror. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) somehow turns chaos theory into flirting, while John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) keeps believing the park can be controlled right up until the park proves otherwise. It thrills you with the exact thing it later teaches you to fear. That is an incredible trick.
4 'Back to the Future' (1985)
Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) travels thirty years into the past and immediately creates the kind of problem nobody can explain without sounding insane. His mother develops a crush on him. His father is too terrified to ask her out. And unless Marty somehow fixes both of those things, he may literally erase himself from existence.
Back to the Future is packed with that kind of beautifully escalating trouble. Marty invents “Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan” to scare George McFly (Crispin Glover) into confidence. He plays “Johnny B. Goode” before the world is remotely ready for it. Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) spends half the movie yelling about gigawatts while trying to turn a lightning strike into a travel plan. Then the clock-tower finale pulls every moving part together with almost insulting precision. It is one of those movies where every setup feels like somebody hid a toy for you to find later.
3 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (1981)
Raiders of the Lost Ark’s opening is enough to make it qualify to be this high on this list. It follows Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) escaping a collapsing temple, dodges poison darts, survives a giant rolling boulder, and then discovers the real problem waiting outside is that someone stole his ride.
The rest barely slows down. Indy hates snakes, gets dragged behind a truck, improvises his way through one disaster after another, and famously responds to a swordsman’s elaborate display by simply shooting him. Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) can keep up with him because she has no interest in being treated like luggage. The Ark itself gives the story enough mystery and danger to make the adventure feel bigger than a treasure hunt. What makes Raiders so much fun is how physical everything feels. Indy gets tired, bruised, dirty, annoyed, and somehow keeps moving. He never looks invincible. He just looks impossible to stop.
2 'Star Wars' (1977)
Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) begins as a bored kid staring at twin suns and wishing something would happen. Then a droid shows up carrying a message from a princess, and suddenly he is leaving Tatooine with an old Jedi, a smuggler, a Wookiee, and absolutely no idea how large the galaxy really is.
That feeling of discovery still powers Star Wars. The cantina looks like every species in the universe picked the same terrible bar. Han Solo (Harrison Ford) flies like rules are suggestions. Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) is already more composed than half the people trying to rescue her. Darth Vader (David Prowse and James Earl Jones) walks through the movie with the kind of presence that makes breathing sound threatening. Then Luke climbs into an X-wing and the Death Star run turns all that wonder into one perfect rush. So much of modern blockbuster culture was built from these images, but the movie still works before you think about any of that. It just wants to take you somewhere enormous.
1 'The Empire Strikes Back' (1980)
The Empire Strikes Back somehow takes everything people loved about Star Wars and makes it funnier, stranger, darker, and more emotionally dangerous without losing the adventure. The rebels are attacked on Hoth, Luke disappears into a swamp, Han and Leia spend half the movie arguing through increasingly obvious attraction, and Darth Vader keeps getting closer.
The details are ridiculous in the best way too. Han cuts open a tauntaun to keep Luke alive. Yoda (Frank Oz) first appears as an irritating little swamp creature stealing food and hitting R2-D2 with a stick. Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) enters smiling so confidently that you know immediately something is wrong. The asteroid chase moves like the Falcon is one mistake away from becoming scrap metal, and the carbon-freezing chamber turns everything personal. Then comes the reveal that changed blockbuster storytelling forever. I wouldn’t explain it here. But what makes Empire Strikes Back number one is that none of the darkness drains the fun. It leaves the characters in worse shape than it found them and still somehow makes you desperate to keep going.
The Empire Strikes Back
- Runtime
- 124 minutes
- Director
- Irvin Kershner
- Writers
- Lawrence Kasdan, Leigh Brackett
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