The Year of Movies

In 2026 I’ll be starting a new challenge: I’m going to try to watch every new movie that comes out in a Munich theater.

The idea came to me earlier this year when I was trying to work out how big the Korean movie industry is. This is a surprisingly hard thing to do! There are some articles on the internet with fuzzy estimates that disagree with each other, in the neighborhood of 100-500 movies.

Part of the problem is getting the data: to my knowledge there’s no single publicly available database which lists all movies that have released in a theater. IMDB presumably has much of that information, but surfaces it in ways that (1) obscure the answer and (2) make me nervous that they might be missing a large chunk of releases.

Another part of the problem is definitions. What’s a movie? Do documentaries count? What about recordings of live performances? Does it have to be 90 minutes? Does a 20-minute short by Wes Anderson count? What about Leo Dicaprio’s 4-hour epic of the year? What does it mean to come out in a theater? Does showing just once in a private screening count? If not, then how many times does it need to show? In how many theaters? For that matter, what constitutes a real theater? Home theaters obviously don’t count; what about museums? What about private clubs? The questions go on and on, with every one dialing the movie count up or down. Trying to answer all of these seriously seems like great bait for pedants, but I’m not much interested in really getting an answer. Instead, the question has become a jumping-off point for my project of 2026.

Let’s set some ground rules. For me to count it in the challenge, a movie has to be a new release showing in one of the 14 Munich movie theaters¹. I won’t be including documentaries. Nothing against a good documentary, but I’m most interested in exploring fiction movies this year. Biopics and historical dramas are fine, though. The new releases rule is partly to avoid blowing up the movie count, and partly so that what I watch can be an even covering sample of what’s released with minimal editorial influence from any source of recommendations. I expect that there will be some edge cases around foreign (ie. non-German) movies that first released abroad in a recent year, and are now being released in Germany for the first time in 2026. I’ll deal with these individually as they come up. The spirit of the law here is to see them if they’re new, and I don’t want to get bogged down in planning for every eventuality.

For each movie that I go see I’ll write something here on this blog. I’d like each one to include something interesting I learned from the movie, whether that be about the form of movies, the subject matter, or whatever else the experience makes me think of. I will definitely include my subjective experience, but these are not meant to be reviews in any traditional sense. And lastly, I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers and flag them when they come up.

Some questions I’ve gotten when pitching this to friends:

Oh god, why?

I love a crazy project. When I graduated from college I cycled the length of the US Pacific coast, from the Mexican border in San Diego all the way to Vancouver, Canada. 2000 miles, and 6 weeks on the road. Now, this is arguably not crazy: lots of people do it every year, and the route is popular enough to be covered by multiple guidebooks, including the excellent Bicycling the Pacific Coast. While I was on the road I met up with a friend of my dad’s who had just completed an even longer cycling trip from New York City to Oregon, some 3000-odd miles, and was killing time by riding down the coast to San Francisco. But still, the thing has a romance to it and, as I found out when I told people what I was planning, a real shock value!

The crazy project serves as a nice reminder of what’s possible when you put your mind to it. Completed, it gives you a good reason to believe that you can do the next crazy thing. Uncompleted, it stands as a half-finished story or a fond memory. Either way, I find I learn something about myself.

And I definitely have something of a defiant streak. The more people tell me something’s impossible, the more I want to try it :-)

Okay, but why this project?

How do you choose what to watch?

For me, movies on my watchlist come from some mix of personal recommendations from friends, suggestions and mentions from internet people I follow, posters I see around the city, and sometimes whatever’s at the top of Critierion Channel. This works well to help me find movies I like: Trakt tells me I watched 54 movies in 2025, and looking back through the list there’s only one or two that I didn’t like.

At the same time, I do worry about the influence of advertising. In the most utopian view, advertising is a way to pair good products with people who would like them. In the more dystopian view, it’s an attempt by corporations to persuade consumers to buy something they don’t need or want. In the extreme, an algorithmic feed has 100% control over what you watch within the feed. If TikTok doesn’t want to show you some content, you will never see it unless linked to it from outside. Surrendering control over your attention like this is fun, but concerning: a meaningful chunk of who we are comes from what we watch, read, and think about. Giving up your attention to the algorithm means giving up part of your ability to decide who you are. On the internet you can regain control by subscribing to RSS feeds and newsletters from individual people and brands. What then can we do about movies?

Now, obviously the situation at the theater is not at so dire as with infinite feeds. We don’t sit down in the movie theater with a blank ticket and watch whatever they think we’d like (mostly -- some theaters have tickets like this for advance screenings) (also hmm isn’t this how a lot of people watch Netflix?), we think about it, talk with our friends, and then consciously decide to go to a specific movie. That choice is influenced by advertising, yes, but also by recommendations from real human beings.

Still, I wonder: what’s out there that I’ve never heard about?

By watching every movie that comes out I can step through the mystifying veil and get a real, total understanding of what’s being made, and hopefully find a lot of interesting stuff that no one I know is talking about.

What about direct-to-streaming movies?

1. Too expensive to get subscriptions for all the platforms.

2. Too hard to understand what’s being released.

3. Good grief, isn’t 100-500 movies enough?

Man, you’re gonna watch a lot of baaad movies.

Ain’t that the truth.

My hope is that even a bad movie can inspire an interesting thought. A movie with flat characters can still have an interesting premise, or teach me something about story structure, or have a neat shot or series of cuts.

As well, what I think is bad may be someone else’s favorite movie. Sometimes that’s because of irreconcilable personality differences, but sometimes it’s just because I haven’t figured out how to enjoy the thing. For a long time I found roguelike games boring. I would play them for hours until I got frustrated enough to quit, and never pick them up again. When Hades came out in 2020, I tried a different approach: each morning I played two runs, maybe an hour of game time, and then I put the game down and went about my day. Short sessions helped me avoid burning out on the game, and daily play helped me build up skill. Over the course of the next couple months I put in >40 hours, and completed the story. Having fun is a wide skill. You might be good at it in some situations, and bad at it in others. I intend to try to have fun, even with movies that I initially don’t like.

I do reserve the right to skip kids’ movies if I get tired of them though.

But what about the cost?

A few theaters in Munich offer monthly or yearly subscriptions. The Yorck theaters offer a year of unlimited movies for ~240EUR. That pays off if you watch two movies a month. Neo Kinos has a deal with the same price, but for 8 viewings a month. I’ll probably use one or the other, and pay for an individual ticket if there’s a movie that I can only see at a different theater.

Isn’t it just too many movies?

Well, it is a lot of movies. At the upper end of 500 movies a year, that’s more than one every day and about 10 times as many as I saw the previous year. At an average 2hrs per movie that comes out to 1000 hours over the course of the year, or about half of a full-time job. It will take up a big chunk of my free time, and is guaranteed to restructure my social life (such as it is).

Too many? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

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Follow along here on the blog. First something will be coming new years’ day.

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1. Arena Filmtheater

2. Cadillac & Veranda Cinema

3. CinemaxX Munich

4. City-Atelier Kinos

5. Gloria Palast

6. Kino Solln

7. Leopold Kino

8. Mathaeser Filmpalast

9. Monopol Kino

10. Neues Rex Kino

11. New Maxim Cinema

12. Rio Filmcafe

13. Royal Filmpalast

14. Theatiner Filmtheater