2024 in Movie Watching

Last week, we covered 2024 in book reading, so now it’s time to take a gander at the year in Movie Watching. Insert metaphor for why this time of the year is good for reflection on the preceding twelve months (look at that book reading post for one about solstices, daylight, etc…).

I keep track of all my movie watching on Letterboxd, so if you’re reading this and are a member, we should be friends there. One of the neat things I can get from there is fancy stats and graphs and whatnot, so let’s take a deeper dive into my 2024 in movie watching:

Overall Stats

A general look at my 2024 in movie watching:

  • 380 movies watched (-8 movies from 2023)
  • 687 hours watched (-6.9 hours from 2023)
  • 31.7 movies a month on average (-0.6 movies from 2023)
  • 7.3 movies a month on average (-0.1 movies from 2023)

Minor decreases from last year, but pretty similar on the whole, and it also dovetails nicely with pre-pandemic 2019 numbers. This makes a certain sorta sense, and while the numbers are down, they’re not down much, and sometimes this sort of thing can be explained by the way Letterboxd sometimes allows you to track TV series as one movie (which could explain why I’m down 8 movies from last year, but only down 6.9 hours from last year). Anywho, this sorta represents a plateau in movie watching that’s just a hair more than one movie a day on average.

Breaking the movies watched down by decade of release:

Graph of movies watched from each decade

So I didn’t watch many really old movies, but there actually are some modest increases from the 20s through the 50s (the numbers are still quite low, such that it’s basically still on par with usual). The big change is a steep decline in 60s and 70s, with modest declines from the 80s through the 2010s. The biggest culprit appears to be a recency bias. The current year always distorts things a bit, but even then, there’s a big increase in movies made in the 2020s. Not sure what to chalk that up to (streaming slop?), but I’m anticipating more 70s movies this year.

Movie Watching by Week and Day

Movies by week remains pretty consistent and assert a similar pattern to most years. A couple of lulls due to vacations, a spike towards the beginning of the year (catching up with the previous year’s releases in January), another spike around the 6 Weeks of Halloween, and so on. Days of the week remains relatively consistent as well, though there’s significantly less watching on Saturdays and Sundays than previous years. Nothing super special driving the patterns aside from general socializing (Tuesdays are also relatively low due to it being an RPG game night, not sure why Mondays are so low – must’ve had a chronic case of the Mondays, womp womp).

Genres, Languages, and Countries

Genres, Countries, and Languages

As per usual, we see the dominance of USA and English language here. Definitely more USA centric this year, as I didn’t have anything like the 50 from 50 Project to increase international viewing (due to the rules I set for myself with that project, the graph still appeared very USA centric in 2023 – it might be interesting to do a deep dive on a single country to see if we can get one of those numbers/bars in the graph up to noticeable levels). UK was at 53 films in 2024 (compared to 29 in 2023), but I suspect a large portion of that is co-productions with USA (as, indeed, are a lot of the other countries’ entries). Japan makes its way back on the list, as does India (which I think is a first), displacing the likes of Mexico and Spain.

Some movements in the genres as well. After a brief stint at #2 last year, Horror has fallen back to #5 on the list (which is where it was in 2022). Action takes the crown from Thriller, but they’re both still at the top of the chart. The big surprise is Comedy jumping ahead of Drama (which is a pretty broad catchall genre and always in the top 5). A minor surprise is the appearance of Romance at the bottom of the list (displacing Documentary). I guess I went a little harder on the Hallmark-style Christmas movies this year. As usual, the notion of what qualifies as a Comedy or even a Romance can be a bit wonky (I mean, I chuckled a few times during Anora, but it’s otherwise a pretty heavy movie), but this still feels directionally correct.

Themes and Nanogenres

I’ll include the Themes and Nanogenres, which are fun, but probably not as useful as just the regular Genre count. It’s basically just a way to further breakout the bigger genres, so most of these are just goofy ways of saying Horror or Action.

Map of Countries from which I watched movies in 2024

The map is certainly decent (the USA centric numbers above can be somewhat misleading), but nowhere near as full as last year (again, last year’s was significantly impacted by the 50 from 50 Project). There were actually a couple of countries on this year’s map that weren’t on last year’s map, notably Ireland and New Zealand (which, as Anglosphere countries, did not count towards 50 from 50), so I had that going for me. Co-Productions can make things like this map kinda misleading (i.e. watch one movie from Scandanavia and you’ll usually pick up at least a few of those countries, USA is often on the list, even for non-obvious choices, etc…)

Ratings and Other Patterns

Ratings and Other Patterns
  • 21.3% of my watches were a 2024 release, a minor increase from last year (but a bit lower than 2022 numbers). Is that good? Or is it bad? I’d say 20%ish is a fine number to keep up with current releases, but who knows.
  • 19.7% of my watches were actually rewatches of movies I’d seen before, significantly below the past few years and may even be a record in the Letterboxd era (I didn’t check every year, but I’m usually somewhere around 25% rewatches). I’d consider this a good thing! Rewatches mostly driven by my mild case of Physical Media and 4K collector’s disease (I wouldn’t call myself a true collector, but I will buy more 4Ks than I probably should).
  • Ratings Spread continues to be roughly bell-curve shaped and centered on a 3 star (out of 5) rating. I suppose a slight bias towards the higher end this year, though the actual 3 star rating is also higher than last year.
  • Letterboxd has a watchlist feature where you can add movies you want to watch (or at least, not lose track of). The general pattern for this sort of thing for me (and, as far as I can tell, for most users) is to see that Watchlist number continually rise… except for this year. I believe this is the first time I watched more movies from the Watchlist than I added (by a margin of 22 movies). This is probably a good thing, and something I hope I can continue.

Most Watched Stars and Directors

Most Watched Stars in 2024

Tom Berenger takes the top slot this year, mostly due to my baffling decision to watch all the movies in the Sniper series (of which there are a whopping 10 entries – not to mention an eleventh on its way this year). This is also why a relative nobody like Chad Michael Collins is so high on the list, as well as the relative somebody of Dennis Haysbert. Arnie and Joey Pants are there for obvious reasons (Arnold is at least partially driven by the Cameron 4K binge this year, which also led to rewatching a bunch of Terminator films, etc…) Sven-Ole Thorsen is famously one of Arnold’s stuntmen and often gets bit parts in his movies beyond stunts. Sydney Sweeney takes the role of token female on the list (I don’t consciously try to shape these lists, but maybe I should), and got there organically (as opposed to being part of a series like most of the other names on the list.

Most Watched Directors in 2024

Directors are significantly less diverse, which is sadly the norm. McTiernan takes the top slot thanks to the Blank Check podcast (there’s always at least one on this list every year). Cameron gets a high number based on his recent slate of 4K releases. Miller’s position is driven by a rewatch of the Mad Max films leading up to Furiosa. Argento, Browning, Leone, and Fessenden are there thanks to theme weeks (and the occasional extra watch) during the 6 Weeks of Halloween. Anderson makes the list due to his series of excellent Roald Dahl shorts for Netflix. Johnnie To is perhaps the only real oddball on the list, but he’s also a longtime Kaedrin favorite, so it shouldn’t be surprising.

Highs and Lows

The Shawshank Redemption takes top honors of the year, which isn’t particularly surprising. Madame Web takes bottom honors, and that’s at least a little surprising in a year in which I also watched things like Universal Soldier II: Brothers in Arms, Rottentail, and the Rollerball remake (all of which I think are worse). Most Popular (which I think is really just what was most watched by the Letterboxd community) was Oppenheimer, not particularly surprising due to its general success not to mention it’s Oscar wins. Most obscure was Off Season an old school Hallmark Christmas movie from 2001 (i.e. before they really settled on the formula that drives current style). For 99% of the year, though, most obscure was an underseen 2024 release First Time Caller, which is actually quite good and well worth seeking out (it’s on Tubi). It may seem a little… edgelordy… at the beginning, but stick with it, it’s a great high-concept thriller.

And Letterboxd included some new categories this year. Newest release was Carry-On, Jaume Collet-Serra’s triumphant return to preposterous travel-based thrillers on Netflix (release dates are weird these days since most films premiere at film festivals long before they’re actually distributed, but stuff like this just appears on streaming one day and disappears into the gaping maw of the Netflix archive immediately). Oldest release was The Mystic, part of the Tod Browning week of the 6 Weeks of Halloween. Longest runtime belongs to Masters of the Air, which is one of those oddball TV miniseries that you can track on Letterboxd. It was a solid Apple TV+ offering that probably didn’t get much play and can’t really compare to its predecessor in Band of Brothers, but is still worth checking out. Shortest was A Christmas Dream, a Czech short film from 1945 that’s well worth a look.

So there you have it. 2024 was a good year in movie watching, here’s to hoping for more of the same in 2025!

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