Seven Samurai - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

The single largest undertaking by a Japanese filmmaker at the time, Seven Samurai was a technical and creative watershed that became Japan's highest-grossing movie and set a new standard for the industry. Its influence can be most strongly felt in the western The Magnificent Seven (1960), a film specifically adapted from Seven Samurai. Director John Sturges took Seven Samurai and adapted it to the Old West, with the Samurai replaced by gunslingers. Many of The Magnificent Seven's scenes mirror those of Seven Samurai. The film spawned several sequels and there was also a short-lived 1998 television series.

Seven Samurai is the highest reviewed movie at Rotten Tomatoes with the highest number of votes that is listed as an action/adventure film on the site. It is also ranked number two on Rotten Tomatoes' top 100 foreign films list.

In 1982, it was voted number three in the Sight & Sound critics' poll of greatest films. In the Sight & Sound directors' poll, it was voted at number ten in 1992 and number nine in 2002, in both cases being tied with Kurosawa's own Rashomon (1950). It also ranked number seventeen on the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll. Seven Samurai has also been ranked number one on Empire magazine's list of "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010. It was also voted the "Best Japanese Film ever" in a 1979 Kinema Junpo critics’ poll.

The film was voted number one in an audience poll of greatest films conducted by MovieMail in 2000. It is also the highest-ranked Asian film on the Internet Movie Database's "Top 250 movies" list.