No Really. ALL the Time Travel Movies

I thought I had finally reached the finish line. After meticulously grinding through a list of 355 movies, I was shocked to realize that a person could watch a different time-travel film every single day of the year and still have titles to spare. I felt a sense of accomplishment regarding the library I had compiled.

Then I found this community list.

1,456 movies. That is four times the size of my original collection. I found myself asking: Can there really be over a thousand more movies that I had completely missed? I had to know, so I went back to the drawing board.

Digging Deeper

The good news? The expanded list included several shorts, TV shows, and mini-series that padded the numbers. The bad news? I had to audit every single entry to separate high-concept cinema from the filler.

I scraped data across Letterboxd, IMDb, and TMDB to narrow the field down to 703 feature films. I also made the executive decision to include “temporal-adjacent” classics like Arrival, Minority Report, Next, and The Dead Zone. I want to watch and discuss edge cases as well.

To rank them fairly, I developed a multi-factor weighting system. This includes a “Passion Index” based on the ratio of likes to views, which helps surface cult favorites that might not have blockbuster numbers. The formula uses logarithmic scaling to prevent massive franchises from overshadowing smaller indies, alongside a legacy multiplier that adjusts for a film’s age to combat recency bias and protect the classics that defined the genre.

This narrowed the focus to ~550 films. I then spent hours auditing the remaining titles to find a “Top 100.” I ultimately landed on over 300 movies that earned a spot on my definitive watch list. With hundreds of movies still unseen, I used my Consensus Score to determine which ones are truly worthy.

The Heavy Hitters: The Top 50

These are the masterpieces of the genre. They boast the highest combined scores from critics and fans alike, representing the most vetted and beloved time-travel stories ever told.

The Next 25: Foreign Film Contenders

Time travel is a universal obsession. These non-English language contenders offer some of the most inventive and culturally unique spins on temporal mechanics, from German thrillers to Japanese high-school dramas.

The Bottom 25: So Bad They’re Good?

I love bad movies like Mac & Me. I hope to find some misfits in this genre as well.

And Finally… We Need to Talk About Josh Kirby

During my deep dive into the massive 1,400-movie list, I kept running into a recurring name: Josh Kirby… Time Warrior!

It turns out that in the mid-90s, there was a six-part, direct-to-video epic about a teenager traveling through time with a group of “mushroom people” and a half-human warrior.

I found myself descending into a rabbit hole of curiosity. How did this series happen? Why are there six of them? From Planet of the Dino-Knights to the Last Battle for the Universe, the Josh Kirby saga represents the ultimate niche of time-travel cinema.

I haven’t watched them yet, but their existence is a testament to the fact that no matter how deep you think you’ve dug into a genre, there is always a weirder, deeper level waiting to be explored.

I’m excited to meet Josh and see as many of these movies as possible.