What is the most successful Sundance movie of all time? That's a good question. Unfortunately it's one that's nearly impossible to answer. If you go by box office, you've got mega hits like The Blair Witch Project and Four Weddings and a Funeral, both of which earned nearly a quarter of a billion dollars around the globe. If you go exclusively by Academy Award nominations you miss out on a bunch of movies that are considered undeniable classics today but that received no Oscar love at the time.

So to answer the question we're looking at things from a number of different categories. Obviously there's box office performance, but it's also worth factoring in a film's score on Rotten Tomatoes, its awards prowess and its overall influence across pop culture. Will this week's The Birth of a Nation, which was the most talked about acquisition at this year's festival, join the list? Time will tell, but for now here's a look at ten of the most successful movies to ever play the Sundance Film Festival.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Box Office: $248,639,099 worldwide.

Critical Acclaim & Awards: The Blair Witch Project wasn't exactly Oscar-bait. It did do quite well with critics, though, earning an 86% on Rotten Tomaroes.

Legacy: The Blair Witch Project is one of the most successful independent films of all time. It was made for a reported budget of $60,000 and earned 4,143x in theaters alone. It became the benchmark of found footage horror films and instantly embedded itself in pop culture, sparking national headlines questioning its authenticity before it even hit theaters.

El Mariachi (1992)

Box Office: $2,040,920

Critical Acclaim & Awards: El Mariachi won the audience award for Best Drama at Sundance that year. It's got a rather impressive 93% on RT.

Legacy: El Mariachi launched Robert Rodriguez's career, which is noteworthy in and of itself, but its real legacy was influencing a generation of indie filmmakers who took this as proof you don't need a real budget and a real film crew to make a real movie. Obviously that had been proven many, many times before Rodriguez's film arrived, but El Mariachi's shockingly small budget of less than $7,000 made it stand out. In fact, it holds the Guinness World Record for lowest-budget movie to make $1 million at the box office.

Memento (2000)

Box Office: $39,723,096 worldwide.

Critical Acclaim & Awards: 92% on Rotten Tomatoes is great news, but it's not just critics who loved Memento. The film also received Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay (it lost to Gosford Park) and Best Film Editing (it lost to Black Hawk Down).

Legacy: Following may have been Christopher Nolan's directorial debut, but it was Memento that truly put him on the map. That alone makes its influence pretty obvious. But it was also a banner independent film. Its box office may not be as impressive as some of the others on this list, but it was particularly noteworthy considering the film's production company ultimately ended up distributing Memento itself after all other American distributors passed on the film, claiming it was too confusing for audiences to understand. The studio bet on Nolan, though, and wound up with a big profit as a result.

Whiplash (2014)

Box Office: $48,982,041 worldwide.

Critical Acclaim & Awards: 94% on RT with both critics and audiences. It was also nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture. It ended up winning three of those: Best Actor, Best Editing, Best Sound Mixing.

Legacy:  As was the case with Nolan and Following, Whiplash director Damien Chazelle had made a feature film prior to this, but it was Whiplash that really blew the lid off of his career. And considering Chazelle was only 29 when he made it, the lasting legacy of Whiplash has only begun to unfold.

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Box Office: $245,700,832 worldwide.

Critical Acclaim & Awards: Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Picture, a Golden Globe win for Best Actor (Hugh Grant), and a cool 95% on the Tomatometer.

Legacy: Four Weddings and a Funeral is one of those movies it seems like no one could stop talking about in the mid-'90s. It was referenced all over the place, becoming a romantic comedy classic seemingly overnight. And it was also just hugely successful, not just in America but around the world. If you adjust its box office for inflation, it's the equivalent of making $716 million worldwide.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Box Office: $2,832,029 in the U.S.

Critical Acclaim & Awards: 90% on RT with critics, plus a slew of awards and nominations in many regional critics groups. 

Legacy: It wasn't a huge box office smash, nor did it earn any Oscar nominations, and yet it's pretty much impossible to pin down just how hugely influential Reservoir Dogs was in the '90s. Not only did it launch Tarantino's career, it also launched a slew of imitators that spent the rest of the decade trying to follow the filmmaker's footsteps. 

Clerks (1994)

Box Office: $3,151,130 in the U.S.

Critical Acclaim & Awards: 88% on the Tomatometer. It also tied for Sundance's "Filmmakers Trophy" that year, the other film being Fresh.

Legacy: Without the success of Clerks, there is quite possibly no way Kevin Smith would have a filmmaking career. But here we are, and while he may not be the most universally beloved filmmaker these days, it's hard to deny that his snappy dialogue and blue collar characters weren't a huge influence on comedies in the '90s and '00s.

Hoop Dreams (1994)

Box Office: $11,830,611 worldwide.

Critical Acclaim & Awards: A stunning 98% on RT, or 100% if you only filter their scores by "Top Critics." It won the audience award for Best Documentary at Sundance that year and went on to get an Oscar nomination for Best Editing, which coincidentally was the last time a documentary was nominated for Best Editing.

Legacy: Hoop Dreams is one of the best documentaries ever made. It's the kind of movie that's so good one has to wonder in retrospect how it didn't get more awards at the film. It actually made more at the box office than Reservoir Dogs, Clerks, and El Mariachi combined. If that wasn't impressive enough, keep in mind this is a nearly three-hour-long documentary about high school basketball players .

Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

Box Office: $46,118,097 worldwide.

Critical Acclaim & Awards: 71% on the Tomatometer. It wasn't quite an Oscar-bait movie, but with it was incredibly well received with its target demographic. Case-in-point, the three MTV Movie Awards Napoleon Dynamite won: Best Movie, Breakthrough Male and Best Musical Performance.

Legacy: Napoleon Dynamite embodies the scrappy little indie that could. It starred no celebrities, it was from a first time filmmaker, and it was set in the sexy metropolitan hotbed that is Preston, Idaho. Despite all of that, it was a box office hit and a legit pop culture phenomenon.

Saw (2004)

Box Office: $103,911,669 worldwide.

Critical Acclaim & Awards: The Oscars tend to not really care about gory horror movies, so it's no surprise that James Wan's directorial debut received no Academy nominations. Its RT score isn't stellar either, at only 48% with critics, but it is $84% with audiences. 

Legacy: Saw's influence lays not in its critical acclaim, but in its utterly massive legacy. The first movie was a huge success all on its own and one of the highest grossing films to ever debut at the prestigious festival, but it's the franchise it spawned that easily makes this one of the most successful Sundance movies ever. Six sequels have been made so far, with a seventh on the way. It had two video games, a number of theme park tie-in exhibits, plus its costumes are huge Halloween items every year. If you add all of its box office together, the franchise has earned over $870 million theatrically-- and that's not even counting its success on home video, which continues to be enormous.