My Year of Movies: 2010
By Matt Baker February 23, 2011
Some of you may remember that last year I decided to track my own movie viewing habits by recording every movie I watched in 2010, along with some pertinent information, in a convenient spreadsheet. Well, to everyone’s surprise I actually stuck with it for the entire year (and plan to continue in 2011). So what were my viewing habits like, you may ask? Let me start off with a few stats for you. To quell the anticipation, the total number of movies that I watched in 2010 was 254, totalling 439.85 hours (or 18.33 days), which I think is pretty respectable (although I doubt that is the word my wife would use).
|
Running Time (minutes) |
Year of Release |
Mean |
102 |
2001 |
Median |
100 |
2007 |
Mode |
90 |
2009 |
Maximum |
208 |
2010 (obviously) |
Minimum |
N/A* |
1931 |
*Some movies were only partially completed, so I can’t easily say what the shortest movie was.
I was actually kind of surprised by these numbers, but first let me point out that I am aware that averaging the values for the Year of Release is kind of meaningless, but still it is fun. I think what surprised me most is that I saw more movies from 2009 than any other individual year. I don’t think I usually watch that many relatively current movies, although I have been trying to be better about keeping up with movies, so maybe I shouldn’t be that surprised. Other things of note: the longest movie I watched (at 208 minutes) was the commentary for The Fellowship of The Ring (apparently I did not get through the rest of them), and the oldest movie I saw was The Public Enemy (1931). Most of the movies I saw were first viewings, but not by much (58%).
I also chose 58% of the movies I saw, with group decisions accounting for the next highest numer (19.5%). As a couple, Eva and I decided on 9% of the movies, and Eva chose 5.75% by herself. Eva always says that I choose all of the movies we watch, but according to this, of the 15% of movies we watched together, she chose a little over one third of them, with the rest being a shared choice. Undoubtedly there are some movies she watched that I chose alone that are not accounted for with the stats I recorded, but I'm pretty sure there are not that many. As expected, most of the movies were watched in the evening (~64%), with ~22% in the afternoon and 4.5% late at night. This next stat is a bit surprising to me, as I tend to watch a lot of movies while marking or doing chores, but 77.5% of my movies were watched without other activities.
And now, some graphs. These pretty much speak for themselves.
