So what completely novel (but not overly complex) process could we try out that isn't basically one of the above? I'm not sure.
If you want fun & surprise nothing can beat a lottery system!
Each film mentioned on someone's top 100 adds one ball representing that film to the tumbler. Fill up the tumbler with all the balls, and draw 100 and see what you get!
A popular film, like The Godfather, will have many balls, and thus a very good chance of making the list. A film with only solo support (one ball), like Grandma's Boy, will be extremely unlikely to make the list. But it could! Anything could happen! Which is why it would be so fun and make the chat room really crazy during the drawing process! Every draw someone wins! And you could argue, that's the best part of the top 100's anyways... the unveiling!
Too random? I thought the same thing. A way around this, but still preserving the lottery fun, would be to allow a film to move up the ranks for any additional balls draw in it's name. So the Godfather may start out at 35th spot, but if another one of its balls was selected it could jump 10 spots (or however many spots we determine... maybe it's auto #1, only bumped by subsequent two-ball picks). Whereas a film like Grandma's Boy could never advance, and probably wouldn't make the list anyways.
You could also have it so when balls are selected they get thrown back into the tumbler after, so films preserve their popularity throughout the process, rather than see it dwindle.
Advantages of this system:
-No more laborious tabulating, which involves proofreading ballots for uniformity in formatting & misspelling. All that would need to be done with this new method is cut/paste every ballot into one long A column in excel, and then in column B just put =rand() next to every title. Excel recalculates the =rand function every time you sort column b, so you could build a macro to have a one-button sort B function. And every time you pressed it, whatever title showed up in Row 1 would essentially be the ball you are drawing from the tumbler.
-Wildly exciting and surprising!
Would love to hear the feedback for this crazy idea!