The sole exception to this was Naked Gun 33+1⁄3: The Final Insult, which was rated with two and one third stars out of four, referencing the film's title.

",[4] and one more right behind these is Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol where, in comparing it to the previous installments, he commented, "More of the same, only worse."

Along with typically listed worst pictures of all time, the hundreds of films Maltin designated as a "BOMB" in his guide also included the following: American Gigolo, the Woody Allen-directed Anything Else, Ballistic: Ecks vs.

Sever, Battlefield Earth, The Benchwarmers, Best of the Best, Bobby Deerfield, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Cannonball Run, Cannonball Run II, Captain Ron, Celtic Pride, College, Cop and a Half, Delgo, Driven, The Dukes of Hazzard, 88 Minutes, Endless Love, Every Which Way but Loose, Fatal Beauty, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Four Rooms, Freddy Got Fingered, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, Grease 2, 2010's Gulliver's Travels, Howard the Duck, 1980's Jazz Singer, The Karate Kid Part III, Little Man, Mame, Mannequin, The Missouri Breaks, the 1980 adaptation of Popeye, Prêt-à-Porter, 1998's remake of Psycho, Silent Night, Deadly Night, 2007's remake of Sleuth, Street Fighter, 3000 Miles to Graceland, Valley of the Dolls, Van Helsing, 1985's Water, Year One, and Your Highness.

[1] Maltin's regular appearance on Entertainment Tonight from 1982 and the rise of home video and cable television saw an increase in sales of the book.

[8] In 2005, logistical problems of a single book prompted him to launch a companion volume, Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide, restricted to films from 1960 and earlier, several of which no longer appear in the annual publication (some had been deleted over the years to make room for newer films, others removed at this point because the additional title permitted it) and many others that never had.

The latter category includes the "complete" (according to Maltin's introduction) Saturday matinee cowboy programmers of John Wayne, William "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

Maltin announced in August 2014 that the 2015 edition, to be published in September 2014, would be the last: An entire generation has been raised to acquire all their information online from their mobile devices or computers.

Scheuer's guide was the first published, in 1958, preceding Maltin's by ten years, and the two were competing titles until the early 1990s.