Tier List
Wes Anderson Movies Tier List: All 12 Films Ranked (2026)
All 12 features, from 1996's Bottle Rocket through The Grand Budapest Hotel to The Phoenician Scheme, ranked from S-tier to D-tier. Then settle your own order with head-to-head comparisons.
The Complete Wes Anderson Tier List
Twelve features in twenty-nine years, and no two people who love them agree on the order. That is unusual: most directors with this strong a signature produce a consensus best film within a decade, and Anderson has three or four that different people will defend to the death. The reason is that his films split along a fault line, between the ones where the symmetry is a joke and the ones where it is a defence mechanism, and which side you sit on decides your whole list. Here is every Wes Anderson film ranked into classic S/A/B/C/D tiers. Think The Grand Budapest Hotel is being cheated out of the top, or that The Life Aquatic was right all along? Settle it yourself in minutes with Shortlist.
Each film below also says where to watch it in the US, checked October 7, 2026 (JustWatch). Rights move, so those lines disappear rather than guess once that check is over three weeks old.
The Royal Tenenbaums
(2001)The one where the style and the sadness are the same thing. Every frame is a doll house and inside it is a family of former prodigies who peaked at twelve and have been apologising for it ever since. Gene Hackman is the best performance in any of these films, precisely because he refuses to be charming about a man who is lying to his children about dying. It is also the funniest: the tracking shot through the house, Owen Wilson on the roof, Richie cutting his hair off in a bathroom mirror. Nothing since has held the two halves together this well.
Streaming on HBO Max
Fantastic Mr. Fox
(2009)The animation set him free, and it is the most purely enjoyable thing he has made. Stop-motion turns the symmetry from a mannerism into a rule of the world, so the artifice stops being a comment and just becomes how foxes live. It is a heist film, a midlife-crisis film and a father-son film in eighty-seven minutes, and it is the rare adaptation Roald Dahl fans and Anderson fans both claim. The wolf on the ridge is the single best image in his filmography and it lasts about nine seconds.
Streaming on Disney+
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The Grand Budapest Hotel
(2014)His biggest film, four Oscars, and the one most people would put first. It is a genuinely dazzling piece of construction: three aspect ratios, four time frames, a caper, a prison break, and Ralph Fiennes giving a comic performance so precise it looks easy. What keeps it just under the top for me is that the grief is in the frame narration rather than in the story, so the melancholy arrives as an epilogue instead of as the thing you have been watching all along. Still: the best made of all of them.
Rent or buy only
Rushmore
(1998)The film where he found the voice, and it still has more edge than anything after it. Max Fischer is not a lovable eccentric, he is a fifteen-year-old liar who tries to have a grown man killed over a teacher, and the film is clear-eyed about that. Bill Murray was a comedy actor before this and a different kind of actor after it. The blocking, the cue cards, the British Invasion needle drops and the last dance are all here fully formed on picture two.
Rent or buy only
Moonrise Kingdom
(2012)The warmest one, and the only Anderson film where the children are more competent than the adults and the film agrees with them. Two twelve-year-olds run away across an island in 1965 and are pursued by a scoutmaster, a sheriff and a pair of parents who are all more lost than the kids are. It is very funny and it is unembarrassed about being sincere, which is a harder trick in this style than the jokes. Also the best use of Benjamin Britten in any film.
Rent or buy only
Isle of Dogs
(2018)The second stop-motion film, and the craft is astonishing: fur that moves, a garbage island built out of texture, one of the best-designed worlds in modern animation. It is also the one with a real problem attached, in that a story set in Japan hands its emotional agency to an American exchange student, and the debate about that is legitimate rather than manufactured. Take the dogs on their own and it is superb. Take the film whole and it is the most uneven thing he has made since Darjeeling.
Streaming on Disney+ and HBO Max
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
(2004)The one that flopped and then got adopted. It is shaggy, over-long and structurally a mess, and it contains more feeling per scene than the two films that followed it. Murray plays a man whose entire personality is a documentary he can no longer fund, the cutaway ship is a great idea nobody has bettered, and Seu Jorge singing Bowie in Portuguese on deck is the best running gag in the filmography. The jaguar shark scene is the moment he first proved the style could break your heart.
Rent or buy only
The Darjeeling Limited
(2007)Three brothers, a train, a lot of luggage, and the film is honest enough to make the luggage the metaphor and then say so out loud. The reason it works at all is the funeral sequence in the middle, which is the least mannered thing in his whole run and is filmed almost plainly. The reason it does not work more is that India is scenery here, a backdrop for three rich Americans to have feelings against, and the film never quite reckons with it. Watch Hotel Chevalier first: it is thirteen minutes and it is the key to Jack.
Rent or buy only
Asteroid City
(2023)The most formally ambitious of the late films and the least emotionally available. It is a play about a play about a film, and every time the desert story starts to land, the black-and-white framing device pulls you out to remind you it is a construction. That is the point, which is precisely the problem: a film that keeps telling you not to believe it makes it very hard to be moved when it finally asks you to be. Scarlett Johansson and Jason Schwartzman across two windows is the one scene that gets through.
Streaming on Peacock
The French Dispatch
(2021)An anthology of magazine pieces, which means it is four short films in a trench coat, and the average is dragged down by how much better the second one is than the rest. Benicio del Toro painting in a prison is genuinely great. The student-revolution segment is thin, and the food-writer segment is a beautifully made thing about nothing much. It is the densest frame-per-frame film he has made and the one where density most clearly substitutes for a story. A love letter to The New Yorker that mostly needed an editor.
Rent or buy only
Bottle Rocket
(1996)The debut, and the only film here that does not look like a Wes Anderson film. It is loose, sunlit and almost naturalistic, three friends in yellow jumpsuits planning a robbery that nobody involved is equipped to commit. Owen and Luke Wilson are wonderful and the film has real affection for how badly they are doing. It is ranked here rather than higher because the control that makes the later work extraordinary is simply not present yet, and it is worth watching mostly to see how completely he found it two years later.
Streaming on Sundance Now
The Phoenician Scheme
(2025)The most recent one, and the first that feels like a Wes Anderson film assembled by someone who has read about Wes Anderson films. Benicio del Toro is committed, Michael Cera is the best thing in it, and the industrialist-and-his-daughter spine could have carried real weight. Instead the plot moves in flat, symmetrical blocks of exposition, the cast is so large that nobody gets a second scene, and the emotional beat in the final act arrives without having been earned by anything before it. Handsome and inert.
Streaming on Peacock
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Open your Wes Anderson tier sheetEvery Wes Anderson Movie by Box Office, Budget and Return
The 12 Wes Anderson features have grossed $651.8M worldwide against $304.0M in production budgets, an overall return of 2.14x, and only 2 of the 12 failed to earn their budget back in cinemas. The Grand Budapest Hotel is both the highest grossing and the best return of the run: $174.6M on $30.0M, which is 26.8% of all the money this filmography has made on 9.9% of what it cost.
Below is the same 12 films as the tier list above, re-sorted by worldwide gross, with the budget and the return multiple beside it. The return column is the one nobody publishes for this director, and on this filmography it is more interesting than usual, because Anderson is the rare auteur whose budgets went UP as his audience stayed roughly the same size.
| Film | Worldwide | Budget | Return | Tier | TMDB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Grand Budapest Hotel2014 | $174.6M | $30.0M | 5.82x | A | 8.0 |
| Isle of Dogs2018 | $73.0M | $35.0M | 2.09x | B | 7.8 |
| The Royal Tenenbaums2001 | $71.4M | $21.0M | 3.40x | S | 7.5 |
| Moonrise Kingdom2012 | $68.3M | $16.0M | 4.27x | A | 7.7 |
| Asteroid City2023 | $53.9M | $25.0M | 2.15x | C | 6.5 |
| Fantastic Mr. Fox2009 | $46.5M | $40.0M | 1.16x | S | 7.8 |
| The French Dispatch2021 | $46.3M | $25.0M | 1.85x | C | 7.0 |
| The Phoenician Scheme2025 | $40.6M | $30.0M | 1.35x | D | 6.5 |
| The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou2004 | $34.8M | $50.0M | 0.70x | B | 7.1 |
| The Darjeeling Limited2007 | $24.4M | $16.0M | 1.52x | B | 7.1 |
| Rushmore1998 | $17.1M | $9.0M | 1.90x | A | 7.4 |
| Bottle Rocket1996 | $1.0M | $7.0M | 0.15x | C | 6.7 |
Worldwide grosses, production budgets, runtimes and user scores read from the TMDB API on 2026-09-03, fetched by film id. Return is worldwide gross divided by production budget, computed from the two columns beside it. It is a rough measure on purpose: it counts no marketing spend and no share to exhibitors, so a film needs roughly 2.5x before it is genuinely profitable. The $651.8M total is the sum of the 12 rows above.
Two things fall out of that column that the tier list above does not tell you. The first is that this ranking and the box office disagree almost completely. The Grand Budapest Hotel tops the money, the return and the TMDB score (8.0) and it is ranked A here rather than S, while Fantastic Mr. Fox sits in S tier on a 1.16x return that is among the weakest in the run. That is not a defect in either measure. It is the argument for ranking these yourself, and it is why the TMDB column is printed rather than hidden.
The second is that the debut is the outlier nobody remembers. Bottle Rocket took $1.0M against a $7.0M budget, a return of 0.15x, which is not a disappointing opening so much as a film almost nobody saw. The only other title that did not clear its budget is The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou at 0.70x, the one the tier list above already describes as the film that flopped and then got adopted. Every other Anderson feature made its money back.
The Wes Anderson Repertory Company: Who Turns Up in What
Bill Murray has appeared in 10 of the 12 Wes Anderson features, missing only Bottle Rocket and Asteroid City. Eight actors have appeared in five or more, and fifteen have appeared in four or more. No other living director with a filmography this size reuses a cast at anything close to this rate, and it is the single most distinctive fact about watching these films in order: the company arrives in picture two and never really leaves.
| Actor | Films | First and most recent |
|---|---|---|
| Bill Murray | 10 of 12 | Rushmore (1998) to The Phoenician Scheme (2025) |
| Jason Schwartzman | 7 of 12 | Rushmore (1998) to Asteroid City (2023) |
| Owen Wilson | 7 of 12 | Bottle Rocket (1996) to The French Dispatch (2021) |
| Willem Dafoe | 6 of 12 | The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) to The Phoenician Scheme (2025) |
| Adrien Brody | 5 of 12 | The Darjeeling Limited (2007) to Asteroid City (2023) |
| Anjelica Huston | 5 of 12 | The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) to The French Dispatch (2021) |
| Bob Balaban | 5 of 12 | Moonrise Kingdom (2012) to Asteroid City (2023) |
| Edward Norton | 5 of 12 | Moonrise Kingdom (2012) to Asteroid City (2023) |
Cast lists read from the TMDB API on 2026-09-03, one call per feature, tallied by TMDB person id rather than by name. Counts cover the 12 narrative features ranked on this page and exclude the short films. Voice roles in Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs count as appearances, which is why the two animated films carry as much of the company as the live-action ones.
The practical use of this table is watch order. If you are starting the filmography and you want the company at full strength, the run from The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) to The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) is where the largest number of these names overlap. Bottle Rocket is the odd one out and it is worth knowing that before you start: it is the only feature here made before the company existed, which is part of why it looks and sounds so unlike the rest.
How to Build Your Own Wes Anderson Tier List
The card above builds one from your taps and nothing else, no star ratings, which matters more on this filmography than on most: these films are usually rated on how much you admire the craft, and admiration produces a list where everything sits between four and five stars and nothing is actually ordered. A head-to-head refuses that. Asking yourself whether you would honestly rather rewatch Moonrise Kingdom or The French Dispatch tonight produces an answer in about a second, and it is frequently not the one your star ratings would have predicted.
There are twelve, and the ones the card leaves out are where a Wes Anderson ranking gets argumentative. Shortlist ranks the full run head-to-head, keeps the list current as the next one arrives, and gives every ranking a share link for whoever still insists The Life Aquatic is his best.
Read more about the comparison-based approach in our movie tier list guide.
Two different things get scored around this page. The S to D tiers above are editorial, and S means a film that held up rather than one that reviewed well on opening weekend. The score you see in the app is a different number: it is built from the head-to-head comparisons you make, scaled to 0 to 10, not from critic averages. How Shortlist scores work sets out the whole method.
This website uses TMDB and the TMDB APIs but is not endorsed, certified, or otherwise approved by TMDB.
What Order Should You Watch the Wes Anderson Movies In?
There is no continuity, so start with the best entry point rather than the first film. Nothing here is a sequel and no film requires another, which makes this one of the few filmographies where the watch order is a genuine choice instead of a chart.
The best way in, for most people: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), then The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), then The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). The first is the most immediately enjoyable and works on anyone from about eight upwards, the second is the most impressive, and the third is the one that tells you whether the sadness under the symmetry is for you. If all three land, you are going to like the rest.
If you want it chronologically, watch the style arrive. Bottle Rocket (1996), Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic (2004), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Moonrise Kingdom (2012), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Isle of Dogs (2018), The French Dispatch (2021), Asteroid City (2023), The Phoenician Scheme (2025). It is genuinely worth doing once, because the jump from picture one to picture two is the largest in his career and you can watch him decide what a Wes Anderson film is going to look like.
One thirteen-minute detour that is not optional. Watch Hotel Chevalier before The Darjeeling Limited. It is a short film, it is on the same disc and the same streaming pages, and Jack's entire arc in the feature makes a different kind of sense with it.
Wes Anderson Tier List FAQ
What is the best Wes Anderson movie?
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), narrowly, because it is the film where the doll-house style and the family sadness are doing the same job rather than sitting next to each other. The most common answer is The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), which is the better-made film and won four Oscars, and the most defensible outsider is Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). There is no consensus pick here and there never has been, which is the whole reason this list is worth arguing with.
How many movies has Wes Anderson directed?
12 narrative features, from Bottle Rocket (1996) to The Phoenician Scheme (2025). He has also directed several short films, which this Wes Anderson movies tier list does not rank. A thirteenth feature is in development but has no release date yet, so it is not ranked either.
Why is Bottle Rocket listed as 1996 when some sites say 1993?
Both are real and they are different films. The 1993 Bottle Rocket is a 14-minute black-and-white short that Anderson and Owen Wilson made to get the feature financed. The 1996 Bottle Rocket is the 91-minute feature that came out of it, and that is the one ranked here. Databases carry both under the same title with the same director, which is why the two dates float around.
Are the Roald Dahl shorts and Hotel Chevalier on this list?
No, because they are shorts rather than features. Hotel Chevalier (2007, 13 min) is the prologue to The Darjeeling Limited and is ranked as part of it. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023, 39 min) actually won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, and its three companion pieces (The Swan, The Rat Catcher, Poison) are the same length and the same call. Castello Cavalcanti (2013) is an eight-minute Prada commission.
Where should someone start with Wes Anderson?
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). It is the most immediately enjoyable film he has made, the stop-motion makes the symmetry feel like a rule of the world rather than a mannerism, and it works on almost everyone. Follow it with The Grand Budapest Hotel and then The Royal Tenenbaums, which is the one that tells you whether the melancholy under the style is for you.
Is The Phoenician Scheme really his worst movie?
It is the weakest of the twelve on this list, yes. It is handsome and Michael Cera is very good in it, but the plot advances in flat blocks of exposition, the cast is too large for anyone to get a second scene, and the emotional turn in the final act has not been set up by anything before it. If you disagree, that is a real argument to have: it is also the newest film here and the one with the least settled reputation.
What is the highest grossing Wes Anderson movie?
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), at $174.6M worldwide against a $30.0M budget. It is the only Wes Anderson film to pass $100M, and it is also his best return at 5.82x, so it tops the money and the efficiency at the same time. The twelve features together have taken $651.8M worldwide on $304.0M of production budgets.
How many Wes Anderson movies is Bill Murray in?
Bill Murray has appeared in 10 of the 12 Wes Anderson features, every one except Bottle Rocket (1996), which was made before the company existed, and Asteroid City (2023). Eight actors have appeared in five or more, and fifteen have appeared in four or more, which is a rate of cast reuse no other director with a filmography this size comes close to.
Have any Wes Anderson movies lost money?
Two of the twelve did not earn their production budget back in cinemas. Bottle Rocket (1996) took $1.0M against $7.0M, a return of 0.15x, which is less a flop than a film almost nobody saw. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) took $34.8M against $50.0M, a return of 0.70x, and has since been thoroughly adopted. Every other Anderson feature made its budget back.
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