Cinema Wellman's 2023 Unspooled

 Cinema Wellman’s 2023 Unspooled

Hello and welcome to Cinema Wellman. Today we are stealing directly from our dear friends at Spotify and presenting “Cinema Wellman’s 2023 Unspooled.”

As a self-proclaimed “stats geek,” it should come as no surprise that I keep stats on my movie viewing. The fact that I maintain a database of every movie I’ve ever seen kind of cements the stats geek status.

So today, on the final day of 2023, I will share some of our viewing statistics for the year. And now that I think of it, I may be the only person interested in anything that follows, but here I sit on New Year’s Eve (Amateur Night) anyway. So…

We screened a total of 794 movies in 2023, which is 4th highest all-time. The record of 1,000 (set in 2020) will never be broken. Not on purpose at least.

The all-time total is now 8,778 putting us 1,222 from the goal of 10,000 movies screened.

Those 794 movies added up to 70,723 minutes or 1,178 hours or 49 days of movie watching which is admittedly a lot of time, but I enjoyed a vast majority of it.

The oldest movie screened was George Melies’ Four Troublesome Heads from 1898, the newest was a tie since I saw 74 movies made in 2023.

The average year for the 794 movies was 1982.9, or 1983 which proves I continue to watch older movies that I want (or need) to see.

The shortest movie I watched was David Lynch’s Premonition Following an Evil Deed whose title takes almost as long to read as its 1-minute runtime.

The longest movie this year was Abel Gance’s magnificent 1927 film Napoleon, which was one of this year’s highlights. 

The average length of this year’s movies was 89.0 minutes, which suits me just fine. 

2023 saw the checking of two rather large movie boxes. 

I saw 7 “Must See Movies” which means I have now seen all of the movies included in my “Must See” movie book.

I also saw 15 “Cult” movies, which means I have now seen all of the cult movies in my four “Cult Movie” books. Parts of that list were difficult, but I made it!

The 794 movies were nominated for a total of 549 Academy Awards, winning 51 Oscars, not all deserved, I may add.

As far as our official Cinema Wellman ranking system (👍/💣) goes, 231 (29%) were given a thumbs up, 98 (12%) got the bomb, and 466 (59%) were given the blank space which means it was okay. Not a waste of my time, but not something I’d suggest you all watch. That’s not a bad pie chart there. I’ll take that on a consistent basis.

The 794 movies came in a variety of ratings, 12 to be exact. There aren’t 12 ratings anymore, but some of them don’t exist today, as you know. 

48 different countries were represented this year as were 613 different directors.

Directors who popped up 5 times this year included Allan Dwan, William Beaudine, and Robert Siodmak.

The “Six Timers Club” for 2023 included Leah Shore, Cecil B. DeMille, and Wes Anderson.

Cinema Wellman’s “Director of the Year” if there was such a thing would go to George Melies. I enjoyed 8 of George’s films this year, and they were delightful!

Genres are always an interesting category to look at, especially when you consider that many movies blur several genres simultaneously. The final tally for 2023 was 17 genres, with way too many sub genres for even me to be concerned with.

If you’re going to screen over two movies a day for an entire calendar year, you’re going to utilize a lot of platforms to get the job done.

In 2023, we got our movies from 24 different sources, a vast majority of which were legal and above board!

The top 5 for 2023 were:

5) HBO/MAX (or whatever it’s called) 51

4) Criterion 77

3) TCM 98

2) Netflix 103

1) Plex 272 (Thanks to Quin for making that possible!)

Something else that I also keep track of is cost per rental when it comes to Netflix. I certainly get my money’s worth when it comes to Netflix. In the old DVD days, I must have been in some kind of file of theirs under rental surveillance as it were. 

This year’s Netflix bill was $1.80 per rental. Can’t beat that.

And that is a wrap for this Unspooled episode, our 49th, and final, episode of 2023.

Thank you so much to all of my friends and family that make up 99% of my audience. It’s fun knowing that there are people out there willing to spend 20 minutes or so of their week here with us at Cinema Wellman.

Thanks, always, to Quin in our Tech Department who keeps things running and puts out any and all fires, Andy in our Musical Department who is always cooking up fun things for us, and Chet our sound man who makes us sound like a real podcast on a weekly basis.

I’d also like to welcome Dakota to the staff for Season 3. Dakota will head our wardrobe department and has come up with some interesting designs for our “signature episodes.” We’re looking forward to debuting a few of those very soon.

We will be back at our regular Friday launch time next week for Episode 1 of Season 3 of Cinema Wellman!

The Best and Worst of December!

We hope you’ll join us for that, and we also hope that you have a very happy and healthy and safe 2024.

Until next week, take care.