The following blog post is a response to a listener comment on MPW Episode 315. Context provided below:

Hi Márton,

Thanks for your comment. I don’t know how long you’ve been listening (but first of all, thanks for listening and even caring enough to have an opinion about this)! It makes me happy that other people actually care at all about such things. I respect that. You’re “my kind of people.”

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First…

Brief context for those who dare to read this insanely long blog post:
For years we have debated how to determine a film’s year of release. My proposed method is to consult the “release info” page of IMDb, and select the date that is the first, WIDELY AVAILABLE release of the film in the United States. So, for example, “The Clovehitch Killer” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6269368/releaseinfo would have an *official* release date of Nov. 16, 2018. IMDb is easy for everyone to consult. It has every movie listed. And the reason it should be a USA date is because MPW is a US-based podcast (and the majority of our listenership is in the United States). And I say “first widely available,” meaning, wide release in theaters or on VOD because I am trying to assert an “equal playing field” where all our US-based listeners all have had an equal chance to see a film. The HEART of my complaint has always been this: *** If a limited December release is in contention for Old Year’s Top 10, but I can’t access that film anywhere, then once I can finally see it in New Year, it won’t be a possible contender for New Year’s Top 10 because people consider it an Old Year film. Therefore, important films fall through the cracks and never even have the possibility of making on any of my Top 10 lists. This is unacceptable to me, which is why I consider a film’s official year of release to be when it’s first widely available in the U.S. To me, problem solved: No films are forbidden from being in contention on my Top 10 list.

Recently on MPW, I was trying to just skip over this debate and tell everyone to just send their list and we’ll accept their submissions (and we still will), but my hilarious co-hosts baited me just for kicks, and of course, I can’t resist this debate. So, listener Márton was kind enough to try to be helpful by writing this response to the recent debate.

Márton wrote:

Dear J,
Regarding the top 10 list conundrum – Ryan is right. 2018 movies that you did not get to see this year do not make your list. The movies that fall through the cracks should be on another list made in 2019 (a.k.a. 2018 revision list). You can make corrections to your first end of the year list once you are all caught up with the movies you missed. So I suggest having a revised 2018 list later in 2019. I hope this made some sense.

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OK, back to answering Márton’s comment:
We have debated this ad nauseam over the years, insomuch that some listeners got tired of hearing about it. ha ha And in fact, it was starting to steal away the real focus, which is celebrating our favorite movies of the year.

But since you were nice enough to take the time to write a thoughtful and respectful comment, I’ll take a moment to revisit a few finer points here, if you’re willing to read it. You can immediately tell from the length of the post below that I have thought about this for hours and hours over the years (and I can assure you this: far many more hours than Andy and Ryan have thought about it). Indeed, they don’t really care about this debate; they just wanted to harass me and poke the bear, ha ha.

Anyway, if you’re willing, please read on…

Your proposed solution is a good idea. (In fact, it was long-time listener Dino’s proposed solution, I believe, in early 2016. But I have a couple of problems with it:

We cinephiles (you, me, everybody) all have limitations whereby we can’t possibly see every single film — even domestically, much less internationally — during any given year. Therefore, we must all admit the genuine futility of coming up with a “Top 10 Best Movies of the Year” list, because most people only see a pitifully small fraction of films.

Our most hardcore listeners (like Jody Horror Guy in Ohio, for example), see somewhere in the neighborhood of the high 300s, I believe. Eric D. Snider, an online film critic I admire, sees somewhere in the 300s on a given year. I usually see in the high 100s, around 150 to 175-ish. And my co-hosts on MPW probably see around 100 to 125-ish.

But I have compiled “release lists” that have, easily, between 800 to 1,000 releases in a year. And of course, if you consider anything international (which I’m sure many of those are), the number would be much higher.

Anyway, the numbers above are fast and loose and imprecise, but the point is, it’s basically impossible for any of us to do this properly, where we can make our own subjective judgment calls for a Top 10 out of everything released in a given year.

Therefore, our lists become “Top 10 Movies of 2018 (of those I have seen).” We all must admit this, of course, because presumably, it would be likely that among the several hundred other movies that we didn’t see, there would be films that replace some or all of the 10 on our limited lists…

But again, your proposed solution (and Dino’s) could address this concern. (Though, I would argue that 99.999999% of the Earth never do fully “catch up” and see every film that was released in a year.) So, realistically speaking, it’s not like anyone will ever be able to produce a truly exhaustive and definitive list … ever. Not because one can’t, just because one won’t. There’s always a new year’s film releases to get started on, after all!

That’s not what bothers me, though. Obviously, the End-of-the-Year Top 10 list is something that people do to reflect on the closing year, and they usually do this around New Year’s… It’s a festive sort of exercise. Now, from an SEO perspective, people are “in the mood” and searching out this sort of content around New Year’s, and I would argue that far fewer people look for these types of lists once the new year is well under way. So, strictly from an online marketing perspective, it behooves us podcasters / bloggers, etc., to release our lists at the height of when people are searching and in the reflective mood for this content.

But that’s only 30% of my personal motivation… I just love the excitement. It would seriously be a buzz-kill for me to essentially say, “OK, this December 31 list isn’t my ‘official’ list, but here we go. My updated list is coming in April.” It undermines my initial list. It kills the excitement and “official nature” of it because I’m just going to revise it later… And it removes that “snapshot” point in time, where like most mere mortals, I have only been able to see a fraction of films at the end of the year, but of those I’ve personally seen, here are my 10 favorites! That’s “the moment.” That’s “the game.” That’s the spirit of excitement. It’s like on Halloween, after you’ve just finished trick-or-treating, you dump out all your candy on the floor and look at what you’ve got. Sure, you could go to the store over the next few weeks and buy all the rarified types of candies that you didn’t get while trick-or-treating, but that’s not really the “sport” of trick-or-treating… The end-of-year movie list is the same way: You dump out your bag of candy around New Year’s and “see what you’ve got” right then at that moment in time.

So, if I waited to have this show in April of the New Year, we would miss out on the SEO benefits. And the real fun for me is just having everyone bring their cards to the table at the end of the year to reflect on the Old Year and to ring in the New.

Also, the Academy Awards, due to the very timing and nature of their considerations and ceremony, occur a month or three into the New Year. (And yes, MPW and HMP alike, have their own “Awards Season” fanfare episodes…) So, I feel like we have that “extra cramming time covered,” where we can catch up with some of those limited December releases and still have the same conversation that the Awards shows are having. So, to some extent, we already get to do what you and Dino have suggested.

Therefore, in conclusion, given all the sentiments that I have expressed above, I feel the only sane way to proceed is this:

1.) Given that I can’t persuade all other film lovers (even in our community) to humor me and follow my method, then I must follow my own heart and use IMDb’s release info to find a film’s first, widely available U.S. release. That’s how I will do it. I invite all others to join me.

2.) But knowing that they won’t … I must concede and allow all other list submitters to follow their own hearts and send me their picks for the year. And I will accept them.

That’s all I was trying to say in Episode 315, but Ryan and Andy were simply trolling me, trying to get me stirred up, and it worked. (I’m scarily serious about this. It is currently 3:30 a.m. right now as I type this.)

Thank you to anyone who read all of this, and thank you to Márton for a kind and respectful proposal for a solution.

Yes, I am ill and as crazy as I seem … and Ryan and Andy are dumb-dumbs.

Sincerely,
Jay
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