I will never watch everything I want to

Ach ja, since I have created a Letterboxd account last year and began properly logging the movies I watched this year, a friend and I have started what can only be accurately described as a cinematic dick-measuring contest (I am surely winning, just not quite sure by which metric). Now, I am by far not one of those kino pedophiles, nor would I say that I am particularly into movies as an art form, at least not in the same way and especially extend as I do with anime, but, you know, I dabble. Between owning the entirety of the Criterion Collection and the average™ American watching five movies a year (The new marvel entry, the Disney remake, an adaptation of a book they heard is good, a Pixar/Illumination movie which their child dragged them to and one they kept running in the background while scrolling through TikTok), I am somewhere confidently in between playing catch-up on a literal century worth of cultural heritage and pop knowledge.

I say “playing catch-up”, but I want to make it clear that there is honestly no systematic process or even a vague goal of any kind of recognition behind this. I am neither a poser, larper or tourist and my love for the game solely extends to as long as I have fun. I neither consider myself a critic nor a bastion of curated “taste”. Just look at my top-rated films and then ready the torches and pitchforks for when it comes to the classics and acclaimed. Fundamentally, my “Gun and Ball” gamer personality extends to every medium, it is just that I tend to be very open and tolerant about trying out almost everything, regardless of the end result.

And I have to make it clear how easy it is to watch movies for me. I have no social media feed brainrot nor any kind of attention deficit and with nothing but time on my hands, the threshold of engagement to watch a movie becomes very low, to the point that it is, in fact, nothing more than an afternoon time wise or something to do before going to bed for me. Compared to watching an anime or a series, playing games or, god forbid, reading a book, it is truly nothing. Add to the fact that I am not bound by the constraints of availability from the streaming service of my choice, the world of cinema is open for me to conquer. And by god, there is a lot to conquer, which finally brings me to the point of this post.

As someone who likes both lists, especially making them and orderly going through them, I have a weird relationship with a very specific subset of lists or rather how they are fundamentally used to be eventually useless. I will not reiterate my full opinion about social media bookmarks “to get back to later”, todo-lists and browser windows with more than The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two open tabs, but if you have a mutable list whose purpose is to be eventually empty, it shouldn’t be able to outgrow your ability to clear it. This isn’t solely a structural problem because there aren’t two users in existence that actually use a feature the same exact way, but we also do not have to pretend that unless someone actually displays restraint, some lists will simply grow and the act of adding an entry becomes solely performative, because it will stay on this list until it has been forgotten about. Basically, don’t start lists you can’t finish. What is that tangent about? Letterboxd has a watchlist feature. Its purpose is pretty clear: Keep track of all the movies you want to watch in the future in one list. Simple as that. The friend in question currently has 380 films on it. On the other hand, I do not use the watchlist.

This is not supposed to be a principled stance against watchlists in general. In fact, looking over at my MAL account, I spy with my little eye 51 anime currently set to “Plan to Watch”, O' hypocrite me. Some context for how this came to be: When I started watching anime, I worked more or less completely on recommendations. Alas, I compiled all the classics, must-watches and so on and having just started out, this clearly outgrew my ability to actually watch them instantly. At its height, I must have had around 350 anime or so on my watchlist, which also must have surpassed the total number of anime I have seen. However, eventually there came a time when the number stopped increasing and even started to go down. Quite simply: There are only so many anime.

In the last couple years, the average for new TV anime per season numbers around 50-60 or 200-250 per year. A lot? Sure, but you could technically keep up with watching every airing anime. It is not even that of an insane time sink with “only” around 4 hours a day of constant anime watching. And while it is hard to properly track the exact total amount of TV anime (And the actual episode count) since, well, ever, it is somewhere in the ball park of 6.000+ TV anime. Even if we add all the movies, OVAs, specials and what not, we are still talking about a magnitude that is literally and physically possible, if your goal is to watch all anime ever. Now, realistically speaking, at least I do not even want to entertain the idea of watching everything, so it is only natural that I would eventually “run out of” anime to watch, so it was also only natural that the watchlist would eventually reach, if not a hard cap, at least some kind of ceiling concerning the anime on it.

Regardless of all that theoretical talk, I eventually started treating my watchlist differently. Most importantly, around five years ago, I stopped adding anime altogether. Part of it comes from the fact that most new entries would have been anime coming out in the future. While I didn’t properly start watching anime seasonally until 2024, I was still aware of what was coming out and when it was completed. And even when I didn’t immediately get to it, it was still on my direct radar. So since I have a working memory, I just didn’t have the need to actually add them to the watchlist, even as just a reminder that it exists. Regarding older anime, I made the decision that if I were to add them now after so many years, they would be a lower priority and if I wanted to watch them now… nothing would stop me from doing so. The watchlist does not actually dictate what I watch. Alas, my watchlist started getting shorter, as I stopped adding new anime and slowly but surely (As well as removing a good chunk I changed my mind about) watched one anime after another, until we are at the current number left. It is not that I will be out of anime to watch when I am done with that list, it is just nothing new will be added until then. And when the time comes, I will either start a new batch of anime I put on the watchlist, or, you know, handle it the same way I do with movies currently. Again, working memory and all that. I do not need to put something on a list, because I would otherwise literally forget it exists (I am aware some people actually need that, but at that point it should be obvious that I am not talking about them).

Okay, that is my stance on the watchlist for anime, so why am I not doing the same for films? It is also quite simple: THERE ARE TOO MANY MOVIES!

It is near impossible to define how many movies there actually are, but at the time of writing, Letterboxd seems to have entries for a staggering 1,239,602 films. Now, Letterboxd is very lenient on what actually counts as a movie. For one, they have a lot of entries for TV-series. Not even for series that have movies, but just straight up normal TV-series, cartoons, and so forth. They also list specials, behind the scenes and supplementary material, which one would normally not count as their own movies. But in the end, the exact number doesn’t really matter. With anime, we are in the thousands to ten thousands. With movies, we add somewhere between one and two zeros. You do not watch all movies, because you can not. And even outside this made-up hypothetical, realistically speaking, you do not even get to watch all the movies you could possibly want. Why am I not using the watchlist? Because I will not run out of movies to watch. Even if 99% of films are not to my liking. 350 anime on MAL seems like a lot? Give me an hour going through the list of most popular movies and I have that probably beat before reaching page 20. And I have seen almost 800 movies. But they keep making more! I will never watch everything I want to… and that is fine. I am not a completionist. I have made my peace.

So, what do I do? Literally not thinking too hard about it. It is a pond full of fish. There is no need to pull out the fishing rod, if you can simply grab in there randomly and catch one. There is always a movie I am interested in looking at me, so do not look ahead. I know the next two, maybe three movies I am about to watch and even that is simply because of logistic circumstances on how to watch them. Beyond that? Who knows? Maybe I see a random screenshot or post talking about a film, maybe a friend recommends something and on another day, I simply see what else the director of the previous one worked on. I am so spoiled for choice, I don’t even need to think about how I choose. There is a certain beauty in it and some might even call it simple. And with that, I am fine.

A few other things I want to quickly write about before ending this only 500 words worthy post: This is actually not at all just limited to movies and the same can be argued for video games and novls. Do you know how many novels there are? At least 5! This will last me more than one lifetime! As for the topic of watchlists: While I question their usefulness for oneself, I actually think they can be quite handy for other people. If you are ever in a position to choose a movie to watch with someone else, this makes picking out something a lot easier. Also, if you are really into making lists and micro-managing, turn your watchlist into a priority list with an actual order. This might not fix the bloating, but makes progress a lot more predictable. This, at least in a small scope, is how I handle sections of my backlog. I give myself a time limit until I have to tackle it at the latest and if I do not adhere to it, then… well, it never happened (I do not know if this is a sign of being neurotypical or the complete opposite, actually), but I assume having failed myself would make me feel sad.

And that’s about it. I hope my random rambling that comes from my daily overthinking session at night made some amount of sense. Or maybe I am just weird, but it feels nice to write about something a lot more general after a long time. Until next time one of my friends commits a sin I consider punishable by death and need to blow off some steam.