Club 50

By my count, I've seen just shy of 1700 movies in my life. Honestly, that's a pretty paltry number when I think about how many movies there are. I don't know enough people as neurotic as myself to keep track of something like this, so I have no idea how this stacks up against other people. I have to assume it's more than most.

I'd like to say my motivation for seeing all these movies is a pure joy of film-making and experiencing a story on the screen. Of course, I wouldn't spend so much time watching them if that wasn't part of it, but the main thing that keeps me watching is hearing one simple sentence: "I can't believe you haven't seen that." (actually, I think that grammatically that's a complex sentence, but you get the point). I'm not stupid. I know that I can't see everything. I can't even see most things. Hell, I can barely make a dent when you think about it.

Realizing that changes this challenge from one of completion to one of strategy. There's a number of ways to approach this. I could look through a bunch of top 10 lists from different years and decades, then compile a super-list looking for repeats but that takes too long and frankly, top 10 lists kind of movies wear me out after a while. Besides, it's nice to get some duds in the mix and that's not as likely to happen. Since I already spend way too much time examining the IMDB Top 250, I could certainly try to work through that, although that list is in such constant flux, I'd never feel safe about finishing it. More importantly, it would be too easy to finish (considering how much of it I've already seen). As I've discussed before, the IMDB list has its own biases as well.

In the end, only one method seemed to fit for me: what made the most money. It's a list that includes the largest variety of movies. It is a reliable indicator or what a lot of people have seen. It gives equal footing to each year. Most importantly, it's variable enough that I can change the size as needed without fundamentally changing the list.

That's where the poorly named Club 50 comes from. My goal is to see the top 50 movies from each year since the year I was born. The main flaw to this is that it is heavily in favor of modern movies and movies that weren't discovered until later, to which I say, "fuck off. No list is perfect." Per BoxOfficeMojo, it's tough to go by the box office before 1980 and opting for 1987 seemed less arbitrary to me. Top 50 as opposed to 100 was chosen almost entirely because 100 was too intimidating, I already had most of the top 25 covered, and I wanted a nice, round number.

Currently, that means I am looking at a list or 1300 movies. I started with a smaller list (since it was a few years ago when I started) and had seen a little less than half the movies. I'm at nearly 3/5s now and an end is nowhere in sight. Since I'm keeping track of this list anyway and it would be nice to have something to point to when someone asks why I saw a particularly bad movie, I've decided to post this explanation and soon will be listing my progress.