Movie genres, and how each one scores
Storytelling is a talent found deep into human history. From the Lascaux Caves in the Pyrenees Mountains in southern France to the complex movie plots and books. Storytelling can exist in many forms such as pictures, hieroglyphs, scripts, comics, songs, poems, books, movies and speech.
To put it in perspective, movie genres is basically the type of storytelling. There are some roughly designed guidelines that point out the genre of the movie. These guidelines take into consideration mostly the narrative elements and the emotional outcome of the movie. These elements are the action of the story, the plot, the characters and the settings while the emotional outcome is usually the most subjective.
Of course movies can be associated with only one or multiple genres. Multiple genres usually overlap one another but probably there is one main genre dominating the movie. Also subjectivity plays a big role on baptising a movie with a genre. For some this is an issue and for some others see it just as a minor flaw if there is a different opinion. In the end cinema is an art and everything contribute to the beauty of its aura.
The list of movie genres
The most popular and accepted movie genres are the following:
- Action
- Adventure
- Animation
- Biography
- Comedy
- Crime
- Documentary
- Drama
- Family
- Fantasy
- History
- Horror
- Musical
- Mystery
- Romance
- Sci-Fi
- Sport
- Superhero
- War
- Western
How each genre actually scores on SpoilSins
A list of genres tells you nothing about whether any of them are any good, and every site that publishes one stops at the list. This one does not have to, because every review on SpoilSins carries a score out of 10 written by the same person on the same scale. Sorting that archive by genre turns an opinion into something you can check.
The table below is generated from the reviews themselves every time this page loads, so it is never a snapshot of what was true when the article was written. Median is the honest middle; the mean is included because it is what most people expect to see, and the two disagree in interesting places.
| Genre | Films | Median | Mean | Range |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blockbusters | 17 | 8 | 7.74 | 5.5 to 9 |
| Action-Adventure | 50 | 7.5 | 7.32 | 5 to 9.5 |
| Superhero | 12 | 8 | 8 | 6 to 9 |
| Sci-Fi | 27 | 7.5 | 7.28 | 5 to 8.5 |
| Animated | 9 | 8 | 7.89 | 6 to 9 |
| Comedy | 6 | 7.9 | 7.38 | 5 to 9 |
| Horror-Thriller | 20 | 7.5 | 7.52 | 4.5 to 9 |
| Drama | 8 | 7.5 | 7.36 | 5.5 to 9 |
| Time travel | 6 | 7.3 | 7.42 | 6.5 to 8.5 |
| Family | 5 | 8 | 7.6 | 5.5 to 9 |
| Fantasy | 5 | 7.2 | 6.84 | 5.5 to 8 |
| Antihero | 2 | 6.5 | 6.5 | 6 to 7 |
| Western | 1 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.5 to 9.5 |
What the numbers say
Of the 11 genres with at least four scored films, Superhero comes out highest with a mean of 8 across 12 films, and Fantasy lowest at 6.84 across 5. The site mean is 7.39. That gap is not a claim about the genres themselves: it is what one person, using one scale, has actually handed out.
58 of the 96 reviews here sit in more than one genre, which is the practical version of the point above. Genre is a label applied afterwards, and most films need two of them.
Cut the same films by release decade instead and the 2010s come out lowest at 7.20 across 47 films, against the 1990s at 7.85 across 13. Only decades with five or more reviewed films are counted, and the older ones are missing from this table entirely, because a review site started in 2019 watches far more new releases than old ones. That is a bias in the archive, not a finding about the films.
The spread inside a single genre is the part worth noticing. Even the tightest of them covers 2 points, and the widest covers 4.5, against 1.16 between the highest and lowest genre averages. Whatever a genre label predicts about a film, it is not the score.
Read those figures for what they are. They describe one reviewer's taste across one archive, not the state of the genre. A single person who likes capes and distrusts high fantasy will produce exactly this shape, and the honest thing to do is publish it rather than pretend the scale is objective.
Genre by decade
The other way to cut the same films is by when they came out. Genres get reinvented every fifteen years or so, and a superhero film from 2008 and one from 2022 have almost nothing in common except the costume, so the decade often explains more than the label does.
| Decade | Films | Mean | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1950s | 1 | 8.50 | 8.5 to 8.5 |
| 1960s | 1 | 9.50 | 9.5 to 9.5 |
| 1970s | 1 | 7.50 | 7.5 to 7.5 |
| 1980s | 3 | 7.00 | 5 to 8 |
| 1990s | 13 | 7.85 | 6.5 to 9.5 |
| 2000s | 18 | 7.47 | 6 to 9 |
| 2010s | 47 | 7.20 | 4.5 to 9 |
| 2020s | 8 | 7.59 | 7 to 8.2 |
So does genre actually matter?
As a promise to the audience, yes. Genre is a contract: a horror film that never frightens anyone has broken it, and so has a comedy nobody laughed at. Most of the low scores in the archive above are films that failed on their own terms rather than films that picked the wrong genre.
As a measure of quality, no, and the table above is the argument. Picking a film by genre narrows the field. It does not tell you whether the thing is any good, which is what the score is for.
As of 13 September 2026, SpoilSins has scored 96 films. The median is 7.5, the mean 7.39, and the range runs 4.5 to 9.5. The full table is at every score on SpoilSins.
