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: Continue reading →