As you might have noticed, I watch a lot of movies. Just how many? I’ve found myself wondering the same question on multiple occasions. However, I never actively pursued a guesstimate number of how many movies I have seen in my lifetime until I saw Cinematical‘s post on the death of Gwilym Hughes. Recognize the name? Perhaps you should, and here’s why:
The world record-holder for movie watching has died. Gwilym Hughes, 65, watched more than 28,000 movies in his lifetime and held the Guinness World Record since 2008, according to BBC News. Hughes didn’t see his first film until he was 8 years of age, but more than made up for lost time, averaging 10 to 14 films per week in his later years. That works out to an average of 500-700 movies per year (?!). Hughes, a painter and decorator, kept detailed records on every movie he saw.
Can you imagine? 2 movies per day! Don’t get me wrong, I love to watch them as much as anyone. But movies are a nice treat for me, something that I enjoy doing to escape from the stress of my normal life. If I watched them that much, I think they would lose a certain entertaining quality that is quite crucial.
Here’s a special confession on this my 400th day of blogging. I’ve been waiting for the right time to reveal this side of my obsession, and Hughes’ death seemed to be an appropriate time to bring this part of me to the surface.
I keep a VERY detailed record of my moviewatching activity in a series of PowerPoints. I make one for every year, keeping a track of all the movies I see released in that year. I order them first by date, then in alphabetical order. A slide looks something like this:
The color scheme is on a three-year rotation. I also add animation to the slides for the rare occasion that I actually want to browse the PowerPoint in slideshow mode. Heard enough? I think I’ve written enough…
Anyways, I have kept one slideshow per year for every year of the 2000s (I only started in 2004) and have one slideshow for the three decades prior. From each of these slideshows, I’ve come up with a rough estimate that I have seen between 1,500 and 1,800 movies in my lifetime. I’m not going to go through and count each one because that would be an incredibly time consuming, and fairly unrewarding, process.
So what’s your estimate? At almost 18, do you think you had seen as many movies as I have?
Marshall and the Movies 
Sounds like my kind of guy.
I just put my ticket stubs in a notebook or something. Nostalgic reasons.
See: Random Factoid #1.
I used to keep a written log of movies watched. I did it for a couple of years but I got bored with it so I stopped. The powerpoint idea is really fun though. I couldn’t see myself devoting that much time to it, but I like it. I’m impressed that you actually make the slides look nice too, as opposed to just throwing data in.
I probably hadn’t watched that many when I was 18, but when I did my year at blockbuster, I would watched about 10-15 movies a week, so that bolstered my numbers quite a bit.