It’s time once again for the highlight of the year (my highlight, at least) — the statistics! And because I love them so much, I’ve not really messed around with them. That’s to say, these are still based on my first-time watches from 2022 (as listed here), not only films I watched for the new-style Challenge.

Before the onslaught of numbers and graphs begin, I’ll just mention that, because I’m a Letterboxd Pro member, I get a yearly stats page over there too, which can be found here. In some places that’ll look a bit different to this one, because I also log whatever TV I’m allowed there; but it does have some interesting additional and alternative stats, like my most watched and highest rated stars and directors.

With that plugged, it’s time for the main event…

I watched 111 feature films for the first time in 2022. That’s my lowest total since 2013, when I watched 110, and my 6th lowest ever (out of 16 years).

Previously that still would’ve been “a success”, because my goal was to simply watch 100 new films. But this year I changed things up a bit. Unfortunately, as I’ve already discussed (a couple of times), I failed. Nonetheless, I watched 89 films towards my Challenge, including 71 of those new feature films, 17 rewatches, and one short film.

Outside of the strictures of the Challenge, I rewatched three further films, for a total of 20 rewatches. That, too, ranks as my 6th weakest year. Not ideal, but — in a very literal sense — it could be worse.

NB: I have no rewatch data for 2007 and only incomplete numbers for 2008.

I also watched seven short films, which may not sound like many but is still my 5th best year for the form. These won’t be counted in most of the stats that follow, except where they’re noted alongside the features’ running time.

The total running time of my first-watch features was 189 hours and 21 minutes. Add in the shorts and that rises by over an hour to 190 hours and 33 minutes. (I would also factor any alternate cuts I watched for the first time into that “others” block, but there weren’t any this year.) Unsurprisingly, that lines up with the lesser number of films watched to be one of my lowest totals ever.

Here’s how that viewing played out across the year, month by month. The dark blue line is my first-time watches and the pale blue is rewatches. This is the fifth year I’ve been including this particular graph, and when you look back over them all, the main thing you can learn is that I really have no consistency. The only common factor I can spot is a relative drop in the September/October region each year, often dragging August or November in with it.

Next, the ways in which I watched those films. Despite including a specific DVDs category in my Challenge, I couldn’t turn things round for physical media: digital is once again the year’s most prolific viewing format, with 77 films, or 69.37% of my viewing. That’s actually down on the last two years (both over 72%), but still up on every year before that. One day I’ll do the right thing and get this down below Blu-ray… or so I keep telling myself…

Digital does have a slight advantage in that several different formats and services contribute to it, though the reason I lump them together is that there’s fundamentally no difference quality-wise between downloading and streaming a film nowadays (most of the time). This year, downloads beat any of the individual streamers, accounting for 26 films (33.8% of the digital total). A number of factors contribute to my wanton piracy, primarily getting hold of specific films in a reliably-accessible format for the sake of my Challenge, as well as acquiring various obscurities. Following on, the top streamer was Netflix, unseating regular victor Amazon Prime, with 14 films (18.2%). Amazon was close behind, though, with 12 films (15.6%). Both are lower than last year, unsurprisingly, but Disney+ actually saw a slight gain in raw numbers, from seven to nine films, which more than doubled its percentage, from 4.7% to 11.7%. Not too far behind was Now on seven (9.1%), with the category rounded out by half-a-dozen others: iPlayer and All 4 each with three (3.9%), MUBI with two (2.6%), and one each (1.3%) for Apple TV+, Talking Pictures TV Encore, and YouTube.

As usual, it was a distant second place for Blu-ray with 25 films (22.5%) — half of last year’s total in raw numbers, and a slight drop in percentage too.

That’s slightly tempered by an increase in my DVD viewing, the result of forcing my hand by making it a category in my Challenge. It should’ve resulted in at least 12 DVDs watched, but I ended up bending the rules and counting some rewatches. Anyway, the format still rallied to eight films — four times as many as last year, and increasing its representation from 0.97% to 7.2%. I imagine the DVD category will remain for 2023’s Challenge.

There was just one other format represented in 2022’s viewing: TV, with only one film (0.9%). The bigger news there is that, in the end, I didn’t make it to the cinema in the whole of 2022, the first time that’s happened since 2014. Funny kind of film fan I am, eh? I imagine it’ll be back in 2023: I’m still hoping to make time to see Avatar 2, and there are multiple big-screen-benefitting films out later in the year (not least a new Mission: Impossible). For now, here’s TV’s graph, showing how the once-mighty (look at it in 2010) have fallen…

Looking at formats from a different angle, I only watched one film in 3D in the whole of 2022. That might sound natural — 3D TVs have been phased out; disc releases in the format are almost nonexistent — but I’ve still got my 3D TV, and the releases are still coming, and I’ve got a large backlog of them to get through, anyway. So, I really should’ve watched more than one! Well, it would’ve been two, if I’d been able to find a genuine copy of Jackass 3D. I’ve managed to source most of the recent Marvel films in 3D (even though they only get a disc release in Japan nowadays), so if I finally catch up on those in 2023, the figure might be healthier next year.

As for the cutting-edge format du jour, 4K Ultra HD, that fared better, with 24 films — the exact same figure as last year, which in percentage terms is almost a doubling, from 11.6% to 21.6%. At the other end of the spectrum, the increase in DVDs, plus some harder-to-find SD downloads and streams, meant I watched 20 films in SD — the lowest raw number since 2017, but the highest percentage (18.0%) since 2015. Watching a lot in SD is nothing to be proud of (HD is usually so much nicer), but some stuff is simply only available in that format. Better than not being viewable at all. Meanwhile, ‘regular’ HD has been decreasing as a share of my viewing since UHD came along in 2017, but this year it tumbles to its lowest figure yet, just 60.4%

Unsurprisingly, it’s mostly older films that are only available in SD, and so an increase in one reflects an increase in the other. To wit, when it comes to the age of films I watched, the two most recent decades are not my two most-watched, for only the second time ever. Number 1 belies this fact: the 2020s top the chart for the first time, with 34 films (30.6%). But where you’d expect to find the 2010s in second place (having been the #1 decade from 2012 to 2021), it was actually the 1980s with 16 films (14.4%). That’s another side effect of my Challenge, where one category required me to watch 12 films from 1986 (even though I only got through ten of them in the end). It’s in joint third that we find the 2010s, sharing a place with the the 1940s (no doubt boosted by my Challenge’s noir category), each with 11 films (9.9%).

Every decade since the 1900s was represented in my viewing this year, as they were in 2020 and 2021; although, as with those years, the 1900s themselves only feature via shorts, so don’t ‘count’ here. Counting down the years in size order, in fifth place was the 1950s with nine films (8.1%), followed by the 2000s on seven (6.3%), the ’30s and ’60s both on six (5.4%), the ’90s on five (4.5%), the ’70s on four (3.6%), and one (0.9%) each for the 1910s and 1920s.

In recent years, I’ve been pleased to see an increasing variety in the production countries and languages of the films I’ve been watching. Unfortunately, watching so many fewer this year has wiped out some of those gains. So, while the USA has always been the dominant country of production, the 81 films it had a hand in this year represent 72.97% of my viewing, up from the sub-70% figures of the last two years. That said, I’ve been counting this figure since 2012, and that percentage is still the fourth lowest ever, so things could certainly be worse.

On the other hand, there were only 17 production countries this year, half of last year’s 35, and the lowest number since 2012. As ever, second place went to the UK with 26 films (23.4%). France was third for the second year in a row (and the seventh time in eleven years), with 11 films (9.9%). Tied for fourth were Canada and Japan with four apiece (3.6%), while Germany had three (2.7%), and on two (1.8%) each were Australia, Belgium, Israel, Italy, and Russia (provided the latter also includes the Soviet Union). That leaves six other countries with one film apiece. Countries that often feature but didn’t this year included China, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain, and Sweden.

It’s a similar story with languages, naturally: there were only 12 spoken languages (plus American Sign Language and some silent films), my lowest total since 2013. Top of the pile by an obscene amount was English, featuring in 103 films (92.8%). For context, in second place was French, spoken in just five films (4.5%). Normally I’d list more uncommonly-heard languages here, but there weren’t really any this year… except, for the second year in a row, Klingon.

A total of 99 directors plus eight directing partnerships helmed the feature films I watched in 2022, with a further three directors and two partnerships making my short film viewing. Only three directors were behind multiple features, the lowest number of repeat offenders ever (tied with 2012). The most came from Jeff Tremaine with three (the first three Jackass movies), while the other two were Stanley Kubrick (his pair of early-career noirs) and Alfred Werker (another couple of noirs). Additionally, two of the shorts I watched were masterminded by the great Georges Méliès.

For a while now I’ve been specifically charting the number of female directors whose work I’ve watched each year. This was steadily improving, but 2022 has seen an about-face in fortunes, dropping to my lowest level since 2017. My viewing this year included four films with a female director — three credited solo (Siân Heder’s CODA, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, and Carrie Cracknell’s Persuasion), and one as part of a duo with a chap (Vanessa Yuille co-directing Doctor Who Am I). Counting the latter as half a film, that works out as just 3.15% of my viewing, which is sandwiched between 2017’s 2.84% and 2018’s 3.26%, but a long way off 2020’s high of 11.44%. As I’ve said before, I neither avoid nor seek out female directors — maybe I should do more of the latter, but I generally just watch the films I watch and see what comes out in the wash. The industry, undoubtedly, still needs to do more. As ever, I hope this graph will improve again in the future, though I doubt it will ever reach 50/50.

Before I dig into 2022’s star ratings, let’s take a look at a couple of viewing projects I always have on the go. First, the IMDb Top 250, which I’ve been vaguely working on since before this blog even began. At the time of writing, five films from my 2022 viewing appear on the list. However, because it’s ever-changing, the number I have left to see has actually gone down this year by 10, to 18 films. I’m so close to the end now, before long I may end up making it part of my Challenge to help finish it off. The current positions of the ones I saw this year range from 87th (High and Low) to 227th (To Be or Not to Be).

Next, my “50 Unseen” — the list I publish at the end of every year of 50 notable new films I missed that year. I’ve continued to track those ‘misses’ down the years, and went through a period where they helped decide a lot of my viewing. Recently, though, not so much. Last year was weak for continuing to complete these, and 2022 has been even weaker: in 2021, I watched a measly 21 films across all 14 lists; in 2022, I watched just 16 films across all 15 lists. Nearly all of those — 14 — were from 2021’s 50. That’s a better ‘first year’ than last year (when I only watched 12 from 2020’s 50), but is otherwise poor. Randomly, the other two both came from 2010’s list.

In total, I’ve now seen 513 out of 750 ‘missed’ movies. That’s 68.4%, a big drop from recent years — the last time my completion rate was below 70% was back in 2017. It’s not as if there aren’t still plenty of movies I want to see on those lists (and there’ll be 50 more from 2022 added soon), so I need to pull my finger out there.

And so, we reach the finale of every review, and thus the climax of 2022’s statistics: the scores.

Before we begin, I’m going to repeat the caveat I gave last year: this stat factors in every new film I watched in 2022, even those for which I’ve yet to publish a review (this year, that’s 27% of them — it was 98% last year). That means there are some where I’m still flexible on my precise score — usually films I’ve awarded 3.5 or 4.5 on Letterboxd, but which I insist on rounding to a whole star here. For the sake of completing these stats, I’ve assigned a whole-star rating to every film, but it’s possible I’ll change my mind when I eventually post a review (it’s happened before). Still, this section should remain broadly accurate.

The headline fact here is that I award a mere six five-star ratings in 2022. At just 5.4% of my first-time watches, that’s by far my lowest ever — the next worst was 2012, when I gave more than double (14 films, 13%). Was it that bad a year? Well, yes and no — I do feel like I didn’t watch many great films this year, but I did watch a lot of very good ones. Has my marking got harsher as I’ve got older / more experienced? I think it has, which is probably only right. But I’m still a relatively lenient grader overall.

For example, the most prolific rating I handed out remained four stars, which in 2022 I gave to 54 films (48.7%). That’s the highest percentage of four-star ratings I’ve given since 2016. Maybe a couple more would’ve found their way up into the five-star bracket in the past, but — as I said — I think I generally watched films that were good-but-not-great in 2022.

Continuing down the chart, there were 42 three-star films (37.8%). These three “good” ratings therefore make up 91.9% of my first-time watches in 2022, showing it certainly wasn’t a bad year. Well, it never is, really — but more on that in a minute, when I get to the overall average score.

In the negative pile, then, we find eight two-star films (7.2%) and just one one-star film (0.9%). As I said, I’m still a lenient marker overall — films have to be truly bad to receive a negative rating from me, and absolutely dreadful to sink to the depths of a single-star rating — in the entire history of 100 Films, just 1.32% of films have received that ignominy.

So, finally, the average score for 2022. The short version is 3.5 out of 5 — the same as last year, and only the third time the average has been below 3.6. I refer you to my earlier comments about how, if 2022 is “not a bad year”, then no year has ever really been bad. To get a few decimal places deeper (and thus provide a more accurate comparison), 2022 scored 3.505. That’s slightly down on 2021’s 3.507, meaning 2022 takes its place as my second-lowest scoring year ever, ahead of 2012’s egregiously poor 3.352. They’re all clearly above 3.0, though, so — I reiterate — no truly bad years, just weaker ones.

And that’s a good thing. Who wants to deliberately watch more bad films to get a ‘truer’ average? Or you could start hating on films to adjust your ratings curve down, but that’s self-defeating — just accept that, if you like films, you will like more films. I get annoyed with people who claim to be “film fans” but give most of their viewing low scores — are you sure you actually like films? At the other end of the scale, maybe it would be nice to watch even more even better films and pull my average up. It certainly wouldn’t hurt. But I think it’s simply the luck of the draw — I’ve seen many an acclaimed film that didn’t work for me, as well as plenty of stuff that’s been widely dismissed that I love. As long as the majority of my viewing is at least “good”, that’s good enough for me.

Talking of good and great films, next I’ll be finishing off my review of the year with my pick of the top 10% of films I watched for the first time in 2022.