Why Are Older Movies Better?

I think if you polled the public at large I would assume 'newer movies' would beat 'older movies' OVERALL.

I think the majority of the general public would agree with me especially if you used pre-and-post 1970 as the split point between older and newer movies as I think one could argue 1970's was roughly the beginning of 'newer movies' because of blockbusters like Jaws (1975) etc. so I would say 'newer movies' would be roughly 1970's or 1980's as the start point.

but even sticking to post-1980 for 'newer movies' I still think there is a good chance that the majority of the general public would side with post-1980 over pre-1980 because the people around here are only a small sample size. still, I would be curious to see the results of your poll in these forums if it was split pre-1970 and post-1970 instead of using 1980 as the split point.

still, my best guess if you polled the masses (as in at least tens of millions of people) in a pre-and-post 1970 poll that at least 70%+ (i.e. at least 7 out of 10 people) would side with post-1970 over pre-1970 OVERALL and I expect that percentage to be further locked in if you did a pre-and-post 1960. but even sticking to your pre-and-post 1980 example... I would still expect the majority to side with post-1980 when was all said and done.

p.s. using your examples of pre-and-post 1980... I heavily favor post-1980 movies as my favorite movies in general as only 10.5% of my favorite movies are made pre-1980 (i.e. 16/153). but the vast majority of my favorites are from the 1990's to date as 81.7% of my favorite movies are from the 1990's to date (i.e. 125/153). hell, even if I had to pick pre-2000 vs post-2000, I would still side with the post-2000 option even though there would be much more competition at this point as looking at the percentages... Pre-2000 = 39.9% (61/153) ; Post-2000 = 60.1% (92/153). even when looking into the more important details for me... even when splitting things into individual scores in the post-and-pre 2000 time frames, the post-2000 comes out ahead on all of them with the exception of my 10/10's which are tied at three each. but the rest the post-2000 has a higher volume in each score bracket (i.e. 10/10, 9/10, 8/10, 7.5-8/10, 7/10) which still makes it a easy enough choice for me but at this point it's really starting to cut out plenty of my favorites in general but when you do a pre-and-post 1990 it's really easy for me to side with post-1990 and VERY easy doing a pre-and-post 1980 thing to side with post-1980.