These days, every serious film watcher is on Letterboxd, the movie review app that now means many things to many people. Paul Mescal loves it. Ayo Edebiri actually uses it. Martin Scorsese hangs out on it. A film-based social platform, Letterboxd is the kind of place where cinephilia is taken to the extreme, with a single-minded devotion that’s both inspiring and terrifying. Here, film nerds log, rate and review every movie they’ve watched, and more often than not, prepare a treasure trove of incredibly specific lists, like ‘Movies In Which It Takes 2 SRKs To Defeat 1 Arjun Rampal’ (Om Shanti Om, and Ra.One, in case you’re wondering).
Every year, like Spotify Wrapped, Letterboxd too sends out individual ‘wrapped’ emails detailing a user’s viewing habits, and every year, I’m astounded by the number of people who brag-post about having logged 1,000 plus films annually. I’m a film critic, and I watch movies for a living. But even I’m surprised (My 2024 tally was a paltry 209 by comparison).
If they watch 1,000 movies in 365 days, that’s an average of three movies a day. So who are these people? What do they do? Do they cheat-watch films at 1.5x or 2x speed? And most importantly, how do they manage to watch all these films? Below, I track down four Letterboxd patrons and ask them for their strategy to cross the 1,000 milestone.
Lola S
Films logged last year: 1,384 features, 138 shorts
Standout movie: Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (2023)
You’d think that being in your senior year at university wouldn’t leave you with a lot of movie-watching time, or any free time at all. Not so for recent grad Lola S, who fit 1,522 films—about 127 movies a month—in between studying for her Bachelor of Multimedia Arts degree in Digital Design and only having Sundays off, last year. “My schedule was completely full on some days,” says the 22-year-old Italian. “Other days were only half days. So I made an effort to watch a film I wanted to see whenever I had free time.” What also helped was a feeling every grad student knows all too well: the urge to procrastinate. “Despite having a lot of assignments and deadlines, I could fit in all these films because I tend to put things off a lot,” she adds.
Lola has strict rules about logging movies on Letterboxd: she won’t force herself to watch a film when she knows her attention span isn’t all that great at the moment because she considers it “offensive” to the director. On the occasions when she wants to let a movie play as she’s working on her art, she chooses lighter films, like the musical fantasy Monster High (2022) or Barbie (2023) so that she can multitask. Since she uses the app to record what she should consider rewatching, Lola doesn’t log films she hasn’t fully seen. Sometimes, she watches as many as five a day—on Christmas Eve last year, she watched Saltburn (2023), The Holdovers (2023), Dead Poets Society (1989), Home Alone (1990), and its sequel Home Alone 2: Lost In New York (1992), all in one day.
Tom E
Films logged last year: 1,030 features, 2,236 shorts
Standout movie: Parker Finn’s Smile 2 (2024)
Tom E’s daily schedule goes like this: Sleep until midday, watch a movie before work, get home around midnight and watch another, or maybe two. It all sounds so relaxed, it’s hard to believe he racked up an average of 63 movies a week last year. That’s 3,266 films, or 1,568 hours of annual screentime. “It helps that I’m willing to watch bad movies too, so quality control isn’t something I need to worry about,” he says.
The 33-year-old building caretaker from Shropshire, UK, considers movie-watching a social activity. At least twice a week, he and a few online friends get together for movie night over the video platform, Discord. Films are also how he and his girlfriend spend time together. Key to Tom’s Letterboxd tally is a strong sense of organisation. “For all the time I spend watching movies, I also spend a lot of time creating movie playlists,” he says. “At any given time, I’ll have three or four playlists of various genres, themes, actors and directors. So there’s a sense of organisation, but also variety to keep it fresh.” Every spare moment counts—even whilst on his way to appointments, Tom either watches a few shorts or updates these playlists so he knows exactly what he’s going to watch next.
He doesn’t believe in ‘cheats’ and tricks to watching more movies. “There’s no point having a movie play in the background—I’d rather just listen to music. And making a movie go faster simply isn’t watching the movie, so I’d never do that,” he says. While preoccupied with chores, he’d rather watch a few shorts than a full-length movie. And while he’s more relaxed about rewatches, he doesn’t hit pause if he has to have a conversation or leave the room briefly mid-movie—first-time watches have his full attention.
Felipe U
Films logged last year: 995 features, 110 shorts
Standout movie: Miloš Forman’s Amadeus (1984)
If college readings had any rewards, Felipe U would have liked to have encashed it for movie tickets. The Colombian student aimed to finish off his coursework as quickly as he could so he had enough free time to pursue his love of film.
The third-year undergraduate mechanical engineering student in Southampton, UK, logged 1,105 movies last year, sticking to a Monday-to-Friday schedule of waking up early to catch one film before attending four hours of lectures, then coming home, spending another couple of hours on coursework, then watching one or two more films in the evening. He also used his June to September holiday to catch up on longer movies. Of the 13 Stan Brakhage films he watched, he let some play in the background while studying because they “helped him focus.”
The 20-year-old clarifies, however, that the rest of his massive collection had his full attention. “I watch all movies at regular speed,” says Felipe. “I find it distasteful when people speed up movies because you end up losing the whole feeling of what is being displayed onscreen, especially the dialogue.” On April 5, he attended a 35-mm showing of period drama Amadeus (1984) and walked out having discovered his new favourite film. He went on to watch it eight more times.
The other highlights of his movie-watching year include the BFI Imax’s Mission Impossible marathon, where he spent 11 pm to 7 am watching Ghost Protocol (2011), Rogue Nation (2015) and Fallout (2018). He also travelled to London to attend Criterion’s 40th anniversary screening of teen comedy Risky Business (1983). “I grab any chance to watch Tom Cruise’s films in a theatre because I’m a massive fan,” he says. Felipe’s Letterboxd stats can confirm this—in 2024, he watched 42 of the actor’s films.
Alex G
Films logged last year: 960 features, 80 shorts
Standout movie: Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths (2012)
“I watched probably more in the 366 days of last year than I’d done in the other 24 years of my life,” says Alex G, a food and beverage specialist from east England. He did most of his movie watching at his outdoors resort job, in the downtime between serving customers. Having a shoddy WiFi connection meant he wasn’t prone to any internet distractions and could focus on the films he’d pre-downloaded for the day.
Around August, Alex realised that if he continued watching three films daily, he’d be able to hit the 1,000-films mark by the end of the year. From then on, he woke up at 5.30am every morning, “found the motivation to start a film first thing” and then finished it at work. “I was bingeing movies like they were episodes on TV,” he says. Friends and family provided recommendations, as did customers.
Alex completed a staggering 21 franchises last year, including the six The Terminator films, the nine Nightmare on Elm Street films and the 12 Friday The 13th films. And he watched them all at normal speed. His only ‘cheat’, however, was to “half” pay attention to films he’d seen before—those by Edgar Wright, Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese.
