Legacy
Goodfellas is No. 94 on the American Film Institute's "100 Years, 100 Movies" list and moved up to No. 92 on its AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) from 2007. In June 2008, the AFI put Goodfellas at No. 2 in the "Gangster" category on their AFI's 10 Top 10—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the movie-related community.
Goodfellas was regarded as the second-best in the gangster film genre (after The Godfather). In 2000, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Roger Ebert named Goodfellas the "best mob movie ever" and placed it among the ten best films of the 1990s. In December 2002, a UK film critics poll in Sight & Sound ranked the film No. 4 on their list of the 10 Best Films of the Last 25 Years. Time included Goodfellas in their list of Time's All-Time 100 Movies. Channel 4 placed Goodfellas at No. 10 in their 2002 poll The 100 Greatest Films, Empire listed Goodfellas at No. 6 on their "500 Greatest Movies Of All Time," and Total Film voted Goodfellas No. 1 as the greatest film of all time. In 2006, Writers Guild of America West ranked its screenplay 41st in WGA’s list of 101 Greatest Screenplays.
Premiere listed Joe Pesci's Tommy DeVito as No. 96 on its list of "The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time," calling him "perhaps the single most irredeemable character ever put on film". Empire ranked Tommy DeVito No. 59 in their "The 100 Greatest Movie Characters" poll.
The film's two-and-a-half-minute tracking shot through the Copacabana nightclub, colloquially called the "Copa shot," is widely considered one of the greatest shots of all time, and is "one of the few shots in the history of cinema readily identifiable by name." It is credited with popularizing the use of long Steadicam tracking shots in future productions, including Pulp Fiction, Boogie Nights, The Place Beyond the Pines, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "The Body. An apparent homage to the scene appears in the 2025 film “Melania,” as the President and First Lady navigate service hallways to exit their final inaugural ball, set to the same Crystals tune.
Goodfellas inspired director David Chase to make the HBO television series The Sopranos. He told Peter Bogdanovich, "Goodfellas is a very important movie to me and Goodfellas really plowed that ... I found that movie very funny and brutal and it felt very real. And yet that was the first mob movie that Scorsese ever dealt with a mob crew. ... as opposed to say The Godfather ... which there's something operatic about it, classical, even the clothing and the cars. You know I mean I always think about Goodfellas when they go to their mother's house that night when they're eating, you know when she brings out her painting, that stuff is great. I mean The Sopranos learned a lot from that." Indeed, the film shares a total of 27 actors with The Sopranos, including Bracco, Sirico, Imperioli, Pellegrino, Lip and Vincent, who all had roles in Chase's HBO series.
July 24, 2010, marked the 20th anniversary of the film's release. The milestone was celebrated with Henry Hill hosting a private screening for a select group of invitees at the Museum of the American Gangster in New York City.
In January 2012, it was announced that the AMC Network put a television series version of the movie in development. Pileggi was on board to co-write the adaptation with television writer and producer Jorge Zamacona.
In 2015, Goodfellas closed the Tribeca Film Festival with a screening of its 25th-anniversary remaster.
In 2020, AMC began including a content warning when airing Goodfellas: "This film includes language and/or cultural stereotypes that are inconsistent with today's standards of inclusion and tolerance and may offend some viewers." By comparison, The Godfather gets a standard "viewer discretion" warning.
American Film Institute Lists
AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies - #94
AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) - #92
AFI's 10 Top 10 - #2 Gangster film
AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains - Tommy DeVito - Nominated Villain
AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes - "Funny how?" - Nominated Quote
