Starting on July 1, 2012 I began recording all the movies I saw on IMDB; you can create custom lists on the site and add movies as you see fit there, so I created a list called "Watched" and with the mobile app, I would quickly add a movie I just saw to that list. This was a natural evolution of a manual system I did a couple of years ago, where I recorded the film in an online spreadsheet. What I would find, though, is that I would often forget to add the title to the spreadsheet, and it became inaccurate over time to the point that I stopped recording the information.
I started doing this because my friend Art has kept ticket stubs to every single movie he's been to since the mid-90s. I've seen them: ziploc bags stuffed to capacity of receipts. My immediate thought was to digitize the data and have the ability to generate little reports and facts from the stubs. But, I don't think he had much interest in that, so I went ahead and did my own data accumulation. I went with IMDB simply because I myself always opening the app to take a look at the trivia and other details, so why not just add an extra step of adding it to the watched list?
So what are the numbers? From July to December (six months) I watched 61 movies, of which 21 of those were released in 2012. Now, it just so happens that I was recording my movie habits back in 2010 at the same time period, and in that year I took in 64 movies, which I find interesting. This past six months it has felt as though I've watched fewer movies, and I have, but as it turns out it's not nearly as big a drop as I had thought. I also have recorded the first six months of 2011, during time I watched 72 movies. Around mid-point 2011, I stopped recording movie data.
Here is some data:
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| Fig 1; July to December 2012 |
As you can see from the chart (fig 1, above), something horrible happened in October, and I'm not sure what it was. Only three movies consumed; August was a small dip as well, but it seems the average is about 12 to 13 movies per month. It will be interesting to see if I can maintain the high numbers of November and December.
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| Fig 2; 2010 to 2012 Comparison |
Now, looking at the next chart (fig 2), we can see how 2010 corresponds to 2012 across the same period. It's interesting to note that a similar thing that happened in October of 2012 happened in August of 2010. In 2010, I would chalk that up to vacation and travel time, but I can't be completely certain. We finish the year off in December with the same number of movies watched, and a similar average of 12 per month (excluding the lowest month).
While I can't necessarily draw any conclusions from this, I look forward to doing more data crunching and analysis in the future. And since the movie information is coming from IMDB, there exists a great deal of metadata on the movie itself. For instance, I can rate movies and compare those ratings to the ones that the IMDB community have settled upon. While I do this at a quick glance, I can see that most of my ratings are lined up pretty well on par, with the biggest exception perhaps being Iron Sky, which I attributed a 3 out of 10, while on IMDB it has achieved a 6.1 out of 10. Perhaps I was being too harsh, but generally I don't put much important on my numerical rating as I do it infrequently and without standard.
I've upated my online Movie Log spreadsheet with the IMDB export, and can be found here:
Movie Log
