2019 Movie Challenge Wrap-Up

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Well, it’s a new year, new decade* and the challenge is over!

So, to recap, the rules of the challenge were:

  • I had to watch one new-to-me movie every day
  • I had to write/post a short review of said movie on the same day on social media

I cannot believe I managed to complete this. It was a tough slog at points — especially after Labor Day, and I have to say there were more than a few days where I almost didn’t make it. (You can kind of tell which days those were based on the movie that day… :p ) But here we are now. Over 380 movies watched this year that I had never seen before or at least seen in their entirety.

The full list is below (indexed by week for sanity/ease of use), but there are a few folks I want to thank:

  • My friends Chelsey, Laura, Zack, Erica, Justin, Gail, David, Sarah, Robin, Steven, Kay, Wendy and Klae for giving me suggestions in the original exercise that sort of sparked this year-long odyssey
  • My current day job (seriously) for being casual enough that I can watch movies while working
  • My parents… just because!
  • And lastly, MST3k and Rifftrax veteran Kevin Murphy for really being the seed of this challenge with his 2002 book “A Year at the Movies”. Still a fantastic read all these years later and I’m glad I kept my copy!

So what did I learn from this?


Yeah, I got nothing.


No, that’s not true! More than anything, it has encouraged me to expand my movie watching horizons to things I probably would not have watched in the past. I’m still not going to give up rewatching my favorites (and I have a few new ones this year from this challenge!), but I’m going to pay better attention to what people get from the movies they like and take that into consideration when deciding where to put my money (which I have so little of these days). All that said, I’m definitely going to dial back for a little while on my movie watching! Probably binge some TV shows I’ve let sit while I was doing this.


Thanks for coming along on this journey (if you did)! I have some creative irons in the fire for 2020, so feel free to like and follow my FB page or my Twitter feed for updates.

*Yeah, yeah, I know the decade doesn’t technically start until 2021, but I’m going with the masses on this…

2019 Movie Challenge – Index