The National Film Registry, by Induction Year

The Library of Congress preservation list, organized by induction year — which films the United States chose to keep, and when.

Award results are facts and are listed in full. The score chip is our composite canon score.

Inductions by year

America's preservation canon

The National Film Registry is not an award — it is a preservation mandate, and that changes everything about how to read it. Congress created it with the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, in the aftermath of the colorization controversy (Ted Turner's plans to colorize black-and-white classics had put film heritage on the political agenda). Each year since 1989, the Librarian of Congress — advised by the National Film Preservation Board and public nominations — selects up to twenty-five films that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Films must be at least ten years old, which builds a mandatory cooling-off period into the canon: nothing enters on hype.

The Registry's genius is the deliberate breadth of its criteria. Alongside the expected masterpieces, it inducts newsreels, home movies (the Zapruder film is in the Registry), industrial films, student films and music videos — because "historically significant" is a different test than "great." Within the feature-film canon this site tracks, that breadth shows up as the Registry's willingness to canonize what the Academy never would: Ghostbusters and Ferris Bueller's Day Off sit in the same institution as Citizen Kane, because endurance in the culture is the measurement, not prestige at release. That makes the Registry the best institutional proxy for popular memory in our source set.

Reading the induction years

The induction year itself is data. The 1989 founding class was a canon-establishing gesture — twenty-five titles from Casablanca to Vertigo declared the baseline of American film heritage. Later years show the institution processing its backlog and its blind spots: genre films, independent cinema and films by women and directors of color arrive in accelerating numbers through the 2000s and 2010s, and recent classes routinely induct 1980s–90s popular cinema (The Shining in 2018, The Dark Knight in 2020, Terminator 2 in 2023) as those films clear the significance bar. In our composite score the Registry counts as a membership source — inclusion matters, and there is no internal ranking — with the arithmetic documented on the methodology page. The page below lists every Registry film in our library, organized by the year America decided to keep it.