Wednesday, January 1, 2025

2024 Watch: Movies By The Numbers





Movies By The Numbers - Previous Years
In case you didn't notice, this site is really my personal film-watching-journal.  Yes, it's available to you, because we're pals, but it's mostly for me to keep track of movies and jot down what I thought.

A few years ago now, I started compiling some numbers to get some metrics.  I believe it stemmed out of a concern I was re-watching too many movies and not checking out enough new-to-me films.  There is no right or wrong way of watching movies, exactly - though I will argue "that's not how movie watching works" from time to time when I get my dander up.

Anyway, our categories this year are:

  • Decade of release
  • Month in which movies were watched
  • How many movies did I watch for the first time
  • What genre does the movie represent best
  • In what format did I watch movies
  • Was the movie a new movie
  • How many Godzilla movies did I watch
And, to start off - I watched movies 253 times in 2024.



Some of those were repeats.  I did watch M3GAN, Godzilla: Minus One, The Fall Guy and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire twice each.  

So, I watched something like 249 unique movies in 2024.

Caveats


I'll be honest, I probably should count a few Hallmark movies that were just *on* but I wasn't watching, but my shame is already great enough when it comes to Hallmark, so we'll just say "249 movies is plenty, my guy" and leave me alone.

I am counting duplicates as unique movies in my counts below, just FYI.  So, yes, M3GAN will count twice in horror, for example.

Some of these things are weird.  I called a YouTube video a documentary, because that's what it is.  I also included some of the streaming docs that are not-quite-TV and not-quite-a-movie.


Decade


My definition of a decade is that a movie was released between January 01, of the zero (0) year of the decade, and December 31 of the nine (9) year of the decade.  For example:  a movie must have been released between January 1, 1950 and December 31, 1959 to be considered part of the 1950's. 

1920's:   03
1930's:   11
1940's:   08
1950's:   34
1960's:   24
1970's:   13
1980's:   34
1990's:   21
2000's:   14
2010's:   17
2020's:   74


Month of Viewing


So, this is pretty obvious.  It is a count of the number of movies I watched in each month.  However, it is worth mentioning - the date in which I say I watched a movie is when I *finished* the movie.  If I start on January 31 and finish on February 1, even crossing the midnight line as I watch, that's a February movie.

January:         19
February:       16 
March:           26
April:             21
May:              23
June:              23
July:               26
August:          11
September:     15   
October:         27
November:     22
December:     24   


First Viewing


So, this is my "new-to-me" count, which is the most important number to me when I'm collecting data.

I define "new-to-me" or "First Viewing" as a movie I've never watched all the way through which I have now seen.  Even if I've seen half of a movie before, or seen it in parts - I will still count a full viewing for the first time a "First Viewing".

Per unique movies like Fall Guy, which I watched twice, they weren't counted twice, obviously. 

This year I watched:  181 new-to-me movies
I re-watched:  72 movies

That's 71.54% of the movies watched which were new-to-me.  

This is, in my opinion, great.  

I've been trying to make sure I'm expanding my horizons, and this year, I kinda-sorta did that.  I had special efforts like my sprint through some Akira Kurosawa movies and some Fellini movies.  I finally watched a few others, like Diary of a Lost Girl that I had been meaning to watch for *years*.  

But I also watched way too many Hallmark movies, so...  I'm not replacing Pauline Kael anytime soon.
 

Genre Breakdown


Action:            15
Adventure:        8
Animation:        5
Comedy:          31
Doc:                13
Drama:            28
Holiday:          26
Horror:            30
MST3K:            4
Musical:            5
Mystery:            2
Noir:                30
Romance:          1
Sci-Fi:              43
Superhero:         6
Western:            6

This is an impossible area to feel like every movie isn't open for debate as to what genre it should fit into.  After all - superhero media usually fits into sub-genres.  "Western" is barely a genre and more of a setting.

I even broke down Action and Adventure, and maybe that wasn't a great idea.  But, it does give you a rough idea of what kinds of stuff I watched.

Maybe the biggest surprise is seeing how few superhero movies I watched this year versus (18 last year) and how many more sci-fi movies I watched 43 sci-fi flicks instead o the 7 I watched in 2023.

I have no idea how I'm organizing these categories.  Do with this as you will.


Format of Viewing


I think this is pretty self explanatory.  This is how I watched a movie.

AFS Cinema:        1
Alamo:                  7
Amazon:              71
AMC:                    3
Apple+:                 2
Cinepolis:              2
Criterion:             34
Disc:                    25
Disney+:              10
Fox Movies:          1
Hallmark:             14
Hulu:                      9
Max:                     21
Netflix:                 14
Paramount+:           4
Peacock:               13
Regal Cinema:        1
Santikos:                 1
TCM:                    12
Tubi:                       1
YouTube:                7


That's only 12 movies in the theater, which sounds right.  

Hallmark, Fox Movies and TCM are all essentially cable.  So - that's like 27 movies on cable this year.

I also am still doing physical media as evidenced by the 25 movies watched on disc, both personally owned and from the library.

Amazon is a bit of a misnomer. Amazon included some movies that were on services like Full Moon which I'd use as a free trial.  


New Movies for the Year


I marked 49 movies watched this year as "New" movies.  That means something different now that when I started tracking this item.  Movies move to streaming so fast, if I catch the movie during its initial release or early on streaming, I'm still calling it "new".  If it's months or a year after theatrical release, I'm not calling it "new".  

And, of course, many, many things I watched never saw a movie theater.  So, this is just the initial release wherever it took place.


Godzilla!


I noted I watched a lot of Godzilla this year, and we watched Godzilla movies 16 times.



Anyway...

That was 2024.  I watched fewer movies than I had during the heydays of COVID.  But It was *a lot*.

And that was between Cubs baseball, Texas Longhorn football, WNBA, The Olympics, TV shows, and other things.   So, yeah, not a busy year, but we did have other things than movies going on.

For 2025, I hope to hit similar numbers for "new-to-me" movies, at least percentage-wise.  And to explore more famous films and filmmakers that I've just not gotten around to.  





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