At the end of our first full year, we thought it might be useful and fun to mine the data you’ve created in order to present a summary of 2012.

Along with collective tallies of diary entries, lists, hours watched and the like, we also processed your ratings (from January 1 to December 21) in order to compute overall rankings for the year across a number of categories. To combat bias from films with smaller numbers of ratings, we used the same formula employed by IMDb for its Top 250 list, which weights films with fewer ratings slightly towards the mean rating for the site. To decide on a minimum number of required votes, we examined the frequency of ratings data and picked a cutoff that includes the top 20% of films rated by the community over the course of the year.

A couple of notes on categories: documentaries are in their own category (so don’t appear in the Highest-Rated Films list). Elsewhere we’ve been a little more stringent in defining genres than the TMDb data allows, especially in the Horror category, which is applied quite liberally. And we’ve removed crossover films between genres too, so animated films don’t appear in sci-fi, for example. Lastly, the popular reviews summary is a selection from our most popular long-form reviews, with films and reviewers only allowed to appear in that section once each.

A slight technical issue today means we’ve removed the poster menus from this page, but we’ll return them as soon as we can. If you want to add these films to your Watchlist, or otherwise interact with them, you can do so from the accompanying lists we’ve created for each category.

A huge thank you from all of us at HQ for the life that you bring to the site every day. We are truly in awe of this community and it continues to delight and amuse us. Have a Merry Christmas, watch some films, and we’ll see you in the new year. We have some great stuff in store.

The 2012 Year in Review in full.