Hello, all!
First, a new threadfic for you, here on Bluesky:
As for my lack of regular stuff at the moment, I am currently super exhausted and very miserable about it.
I am at the moment two weeks late on what should be a 12-weekly shot of my testosterone because my GP refuses to administer it and I have to get it done privately, which is proving more annoying than one would hope. Low T is no joke, especially given that the sunshine and my higher meds dose have been helping me so much in general, it’s maddening to basically feel like shit as a result of medical bias and bigotry.
Hopefully, I shall have this sorted by this weekend, just cross your fingers for me.
I have largely been working on longer projects when I’ve been able to concentrate, so there are hopefully some novellas in your future – in the meantime, I thought this non-fiction analysis would be a bit of fun.
This day last week, I posted this poll on Tumblr asking what genre people’s most rewatched movie was. I don’t actually care that much about genres, and the poll was a bit of subterfuge to get people to engage and then share more interesting info in the tags – what movies they have seen the most times. People often don’t reblog polls off-site as much and obviously don’t tag onto each other or discuss like they do on real polls, thus my going off the Tumblr tags.
There were a little over 2500 reblogs, and I went through all the reblogs with comments and tags, as well as collating the replies, and I made a list of all the movies people mentioned – and now I have a Letterboxd list here of over 1100 movies!
Part of the reason that I asked “rewatched the most” rather than after people’s favourites is because I find that there’s some movies I wouldn’t necessarily rank as absolute favourites of mine, but I have rewatched a lot more for comfort or out of ease of access, or rewatched a lot because I’ve wanted to show them to others or they’ve been good to watch on a movie night.
Obviously, for those of us who grew up pre-streaming services, there’s some movies we’ll have seen way more because we had them on VHS or they regularly showed up on repeat on certain TV channels, and loads of people in the tags referenced wearing out the VHS cassette or the DVD for certain favourite movies.
Some people were especially helpful in my quest by tagging movie titles in full with release dates, and some people put their tagged movies in the most indecipherable acronym form, and I was not actually able to figure out what ALL the initialisations stood for, but I got most of the movies anyway! And some people said they liked a movie, but didn’t specify which version of it, so in some places I included multiple versions on the Letterboxd list, or the ones I thought most likely.
With that said, this was horrible to do, I had to type up all the tags manually because I couldn’t find a good program to look at other users’ tags rather than my own tags, and I will not be doing it like this again.
People tagged movie series a lot – Lord of The Rings showed up 135 times, with people tagging Fellowship 28 times; Two Towers 17 times; and Return of the King 3 times.
People tagged Star Wars 37 times, and then the top individual SW movies tagged were A New Hope and Return of the Jedi at 7 tags and 6 respectively.
And then Pirates of the Caribbean, of course, with 18 tags for the series, and the most specified being Black Pearl at 7 tags.
Those movies aside, the 50 most mentioned movies were as below. I’ve included Back to the Future and Jurassic Park below, though it could be that taggers were referring to the series of films rather than the first in each of those series.
| Movie Name | Release | Director | Count |
| The Princess Bride | 1987 | Rob Reiner | 108 |
| Pride and Prejudice | 2005 | Joe Wright | 56 |
| How To Train Your Dragon | 2010 | Chris Sanders, Dean DeBois | 44 |
| Jurassic Park | 1993 | Steven Spielberg | 37 |
| The Lion King | 1994 | Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff | 32 |
| Labyrinth | 1986 | Jim Henson | 31 |
| Howl’s Moving Castle | 2004 | Hayao Miyazaki | 28 |
| Mamma Mia! | 2008 | Phyllida Lloyd | 28 |
| Clue | 1985 | Jonathan Lynn | 27 |
| Pacific Rim | 2013 | Guillermo del Toro | 27 |
| The Mummy | 1999 | Stephen Sommers | 25 |
| Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron | 2002 | Kelly Asbury, Lorna Cook | 24 |
| The Last Unicorn | 1982 | Jules Bass, Arthur Rankin Jnr | 23 |
| Shrek | 2001 | Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson | 22 |
| Tangled | 2010 | Nathan Greno, Byron Howard | 22 |
| Mad Max: Fury Road | 2015 | George Miller | 20 |
| Back to the Future | 1985 | Robert Zemeckis | 19 |
| Mulan | 1998 | Tony Bancroft, Barry Cook | 18 |
| Rocky Horror Picture Show | 1975 | Jim Sharman | 18 |
| Inception | 2010 | Christopher Nolan | 17 |
| The Thing | 1982 | John Carpenter | 17 |
| Beauty and the Beast | 1991 | Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise | 16 |
| Heathers | 1989 | Michael Lehmann | 16 |
| The Sound of Music | 1965 | Robert Wise | 16 |
| 10 Things I Hate About You | 1999 | Gil Junger | 15 |
| Shrek 2 | 2004 | Conrad Vernon, Kelly Asbury | 15 |
| Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 1975 | Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones | 14 |
| Robin Hood | 1973 | Wolfgang Reitherman | 14 |
| Scream | 1996 | Wes Craven | 14 |
| The Fifth Element | 1997 | Luc Besson | 14 |
| Titanic | 1997 | James Cameron | 14 |
| Treasure Planet | 2002 | Ron Clements, John Musker | 14 |
| Twilight | 2008 | Catherine Hardwicke | 14 |
| Captain America: The Winter Soldier | 2014 | Joe Russo, Anthony Russo | 13 |
| Megamind | 2010 | Tom McGrath | 13 |
| Moulin Rouge! | 2001 | Baz Luhrmann | 13 |
| Saw | 2004 | James Wan | 13 |
| Spirited Away | 2001 | Hayao Miyazaki | 13 |
| Coraline | 2009 | Henry Selick | 12 |
| Fight Club | 1999 | David Fincher | 12 |
| Knives Out | 2019 | Rian Johnson | 12 |
| Mary Poppins | 1964 | Robert Stevenson | 12 |
| Scott Pilgrim vs the World | 2010 | Edgar Wright | 12 |
| Anastasia | 1997 | Gary Goldman, Don Bluth | 11 |
| My Neighbor Totoro | 1988 | Hayao Miyazaki | 11 |
| Newsies | 1992 | Kenny Ortega | 11 |
| The Matrix | 1999 | The Wachowski Sisters | 11 |
| Twister | 1996 | Jan de Bont | 11 |
| Cars | 2006 | John Lasseter | 10 |
| Princess Mononoke | 1997 | Hayao Miyazaki | 10 |
If you are a big data fan, you can see my whole spreadsheet here, although no doubt it’s riddled with little typos and such, and I won’t be making any further edits to it now.
Some of these movies I expected – I was just recently on a panel about the enduring legacy of Labyrinth at EasterCon in April, and of course I’m very familiar with movies like The Princess Bride, The Thing, Clue, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Mummy, Pride and Prejudice, and The Last Unicorn. I see all of them regularly appear in GIFsets and image sets.
Some of the kids movies were more surprising for me, though, I think just because they passed me by – like, the Shrek movies were big when I was growing up, and I knew a lot of the Disney movies, but I’ve never actually seen Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (or Brother Bear, which came up a few times), and I was surprised it was one of the most popular choices!
How To Train Your Dragon’s popularity really surprised me as well! I actually probably have seen it two or three times myself, and it genuinely is a great flick, I just didn’t know it was so popular as a regular rewatch.
Thanks so much for everyone who took part in my silly little poll and satiated my curiosity!
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