This is what it's like to be a huge nerd

This originally began as a comment on the Blog of Doom, but now that I got this whole thing fixed, I guess I caught the posting bug again. Will it continue? Who knows! History suggests no!

So on Oscar night, I was reflecting on how much more interesting the awards were back when I watched more movies. Back in the 90s I used to go to movies all the time, and I'd see three or five at a time. I'd see practically everything playing that I had any interest in, and some stuff I wasn't really interested in. But in 2011, I saw exactly two movies in the theater - The Muppets and Harry Potter 8. And they weren't exactly nominated for a lot of big awards.

(As an aside, WTF was with not performing the Best Original Song nominees? Other than curiosity as to whether or not Billy Crystal hosting was still as good as I thought it was ten years ago, the "Man or Muppet" performance was the one thing I was really looking forward to on the show.)

So the thought occurred to me, yes I used to go to a lot of movies and now I go to few, but exactly how many more more movies per year was I watching at my peak? This called for quantification! This called for data! So I went on Box Office Mojo and went through the top 200 grossing films of each year and counted how many I had seen in the theater. Turns out my peak was 26 films in 1998. So question answered, but now I had a data set of every year I've been alive and how many movies I saw in the theater in each of them. I made a graph of it:

And since it didn't occur to me to note them all on my first pass-through, I went through the top 200 of each year again, to verify my data and to note down the films themselves. So now I have a complete list of every movie I've ever seen in a theater. I can tell you that in my life I've seen 201 movies in the theater, and that the 200th movie I ever saw in a theater was Harry Potter 8. The 100th was one of the 22 I saw in 1999. I can tell you that in the six-year period between 1997 and 2002 I saw a total of 105 movies, and that in the entire rest of my life I've only seen 96, and that at my recent pace it'l be at least 2014 before the rest of my lifetime catches up with that 6-year period.

Data makes everything awesome.