HBO Movies Ranked by Rotten Tomatoes Score

published by Chand Bellur
May 21, 2016 at 3:18 p.m. PST

HBO offers almost 500 movies in their collection. Some are excellent, but many are not worth watching. This article presents the entire HBO movie collection ranked by Rotten Tomatoes Score.

HBO

HBO started broadcasting in 1972 with humble beginnings. The network is now the largest premium TV and online content provider. With 122 million subscribers worldwide, HBO even beats Netflix. In addition to hit television shows like Game of Thrones, HBO offers almost 500 movies.

Movies have always been a huge part of HBO. After all, the acronym stands for Home Box Office. Instead of going out to the movies, subscribers could enjoy films in the comfort of their own home. This was before VCRs and the consumer-facing Internet. Over time, HBO has grown its selection of movies. Some are excellent, critically acclaimed movies. Others just aren’t worth anyone’s time.

On April 7 2015, HBO launched their HBO NOW service. They already offered streaming movies over the web and on mobile devices since the mid 2000s. These services eventually culminated in HBO GO. Unfortunately, HBO GO required a cable or satellite subscription for activation. HBO managed to break out of the TV industry collusion, offering all of their content to cord-cutters.

Being a cord-cutter myself, I signed up for HBO NOW the day it launched. I use it so often, I actually cancelled my other streaming video subscriptions. HBO NOW, is, by far, the best streaming video provider. It’s also the most expensive, at almost twice the cost of Netflix, Hulu and other providers. You get what you pay for. HBO NOW is well worth the price.

HBO NOW doesn’t offer any reviews and ratings for movies. Unlike Netflix, iTunes and other content providers, viewers have to guess which movies are worth watching. After watching a few really bad movies, I started checking titles against Rotten Tomatoes. It was a frustrating process. It made sense to develop a list of HBO movies ranked by Rotten Tomatoes scores.

You may be tempted to add everything over a certain score to your watchlist. Be advised, this may slow down access to your watchlist. I learned this the hard way. It’s best to add a few movies at a time. You can bookmark or like this page and come back for more.

Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes launched in 1998 as part of the emerging .com scene. The site aggregates reviews from critics and attributes a “Tomatometer” score. The Tomatometer ranges from 0% to 100%, with 100% being a great movie and 0% being horrible. Films rated from 75-100% are “certified fresh”. They’re reviewed by 40 or more critics and garner excellent reviews. The 60% to 74% range applies to “fresh” movies. They could either have less than 40 excellent critical reviews or more than 40 average reviews. Anything from 0-59% is considered rotten. Don’t bother watching these unless you enjoy bad movies. The Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan may enjoy the occasional bad movie.

Rotten Tomatoes already offers a list of HBO movies and their Tomatometer scores. The problem is that it is incomplete and out of date. They only list 286 HBO movies, which is a little more than half of the collection. Browsing over Rotten Tomatoes results, I quickly noticed movies that are no longer offered by HBO, in addition to the missing films.

Please Report Errata

Managing a list of almost 500 movies is a daunting task. As a software engineer, I wanted to automate this task, but it’s more difficult than it seems. The biggest problem is that there are duplicate titles for a lot of movies. It takes a lot of clever logic to find the right movie. One could match these based on actors or date, but I found that this information is not always present. I could do it, but I didn’t want to spend 30 hours writing code for something that I could do manually in 10.

This was a time-consuming endeavor. HBO’s movie collection is constantly changing. It’s a moving target. In fact, by the time I finished assigning the Rotten Tomatoes scores, I noticed HBO had already added and removed some movies.

This list is the most complete and accurate one you will find on the web, but it’s not perfect. Please report any missing or incorrect information in the comments below. I will try to update this list as often as I can. Reporting updates and mistakes will help me do this.

Movies with No Score

At the very end of this list, you’ll notice movies that only have a “-” for their Tomatometer score. This means that it wasn’t reviewed yet or wasn’t in Rotten Tomatoes at all. These aren’t necessarily bad movies. Some aren’t movies at all, but are HBO “first looks”, shorts, and brief programs about what to watch on HBO in a particular month. A lot of HBO-produced movies don’t get reviewed, but they’re still excellent. I encourage you to go to the end of the list and explore these options. Continue on to the next page to view the list of HBO movies ranked by their Rotten Tomatoes score.