Last year I saw a total of 82 movies that I can remember, a fact which I consider both impressive and unimpressive; impressive because it’s more than I would have guessed, unimpressive because I have friends like Sara who have been known to see on the order of 400 movies any given calendar year.

My three favorite movies I saw in theatrical release in 2015 were:

  1. Mad Max: Fury Road
  2. Mad Max: Fury Road 3D
  3. It Follows

Yeah, I’m putting Mad Max on there twice. It was that good. This completely unbiased piece pretty much sums up how I feel about it.

Still, the neurotic in me thought it would be a good idea to compile some other stats I was curious about. First, I wanted to know the breakdown of movies seen in a theater vs. other formats:

Maybe TV isn't a legit category anymore

I want to say there were probably a few more movies I saw on a plane – 2015 was a record year for travel in the continental states – but I just can’t remember. Shoulda kept better records.

The Nitehawk is the cinephile’s dream of a movie theater across the street from where I live, so I was curious what percentage of movies I saw there:
Everyone should go to the Nitehawk more
myself included

Next, I wanted to know how many movies I watched were repeat viewings (movies I was seeing for the second time or more). This percentage was higher than I expected, so I also wondered how many bucket list movies I was able to cross off in 2015; I’ll (arbitrarily) define a bucket list movie as a critically/culturally acclaimed movie that I’ve wanted to see for a while and was not released in the current year.
Whose thumb really matters these days?

I’ll need to put some more thought into what I think the ideal percentage of rewatched movies is, but I think I can increase my bucket list percentage.

Finally, I have a hypothesis that as time goes on I should theoretically get better at picking movies I’ll enjoy, so I also tallied how many movies of the ones I hadn’t seen before that I would give a thumbs up to:
Whose thumb actually matters these days?

This is fairly imprecise but at least it’ll provide some directional indication of how much of my overall time spent watching movies is enjoyable. I’ll revisit if I can find a better way to measure this.