Here’s a copy of what I’ve posted on IMDB tonight:
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This is a question that I’d appreciate if one of the staff would help answer.
According to what I could find on Google- you can try, but I did a good job already and found the only results it had (I also did Wikipedia)- in the 90s it was estimated that 65,000 ‘films’ had been made. Obviously it’s very difficult to define ‘film’- do shorts or straight to videos etc. count? For what I want an answer to, no- I only want an answer to the number of movies that are typical movies 1.5-3 hours maybe longer, made independently or by a studio in any country. I would think certainly that the people who came up w/ 65,000 only included feature-length films w/ some kind of box-office release?
I also found one site- http://silentjay.com.co.nr/ - that said that, as of last October, “there are approximately 35,000 movies available on DVD. This number of movies, according to The Digital Bits, would cost someone $800,000 to own every one of them.”
Can one of the IMDB staff tell me how many movies, both feature-length (give me that number) and short films (that number) that count as ‘actual’ movies according to what I describe above? Or does anyone else have other statistics they heard?
And finally: I could not find it on Google, but does any wealthy person own every movie on dvd ever made ? I mean, it’s impossible to watch 35,000 movies in a lifetime for goodness sakes, but anyone with many millions of dollars could own them all. That would be so sweet… *
But if you did own 35,000 dvds, you’d not only need a warehouse of ordered shelves at reach-length in climate control and lights, but also the workers to sort them, dust them off occasionally, and a computer database to find what you need.
Let’s make the wild assumption that each of the 35,000 movies run about 1hr 45min each and you watched them about 16 hours a day. It would take about 10.5 years to watch them all.
How could I have made this mistake? I can’t believe it. Of course it’s possible…
And if one were a millionaire at a young age and watched them over a longer period than these 10 years, even knowing the number will go up (both the 35m and the 65m), the amount of time saved from not working a job ever is plenty to cover this while still exercising, making love, travelling perhaps, and having an education…
The IMDb lists 326,235 theatrical movies, and they aren’t remotely complete. The number of theatrical films made is well over a million, not even counting films made for TV and cable. Indeed, the number was over a million whenever in the 1990’s that figure of 65,000 was given. 65,000 sounds low even if you’re only counting American films.
Certainly it’s physically possible to see 400 movies a year in 60 years of adult life, so it’s at least possible that someone could see 24,000 movies in their life.
Click on the Index page on IMDb and then on Statistics for the number of films that they include. The “over a million” is an estimate, but consider all the movies they don’t include. They are only even approximately complete on recent American films. They aren’t nearly as good on other countries’s films. They aren’t even that good on older American films.
I’ve been doing a little more research on the number of movies in the IMDb. I suspect that the films from the non-North-American, non-European countries of the world are only rather sketchily included in the IMDb. A chart from an article in a newspaper article I read recently says that 1,200 movies were made in India in 2002. The IMDb only lists 262 of them. Looking at a few other countries, are there really only 36 movies made in the entire history of Ecuador, or only 86 in the entire history of Nigeria, or only 270 in the entire history of Thailand?
On the other hand, the listing for old silent American films is better than I expected. I knew that there are enormous numbers of lost silent films. In 1915, for instance, the IMDb lists 3,630 films. So, although most of them are lost, their titles and some other information about them has been kept.
The IMDb currently lists 329,401 movies originally released to theaters, 50,895 orginally shown on TV, and 40,356 originally released on video. Since a movie released in one country in theaters will often be released in another country on TV or in video, I would count these as movies. I wouldn’t count mini-series though, since it’s not possible to watch them in one night in a theater. So the number of what I would call movies listed on the IMDb is pushing half a million, and I suspect the true number, given all those not listed there, is over a million.
my roommate, who is a filmmaker, NYU film school grad, and former local video store clerk, claims to have seen over 10,000 movies, and that figure doesn’t surprise me a bit considering that he watches an average of 3 movies a day…and also insists on rewatching EVERY movie, no matter how awful, with the audio commentary.
I can tell you this: Every American film (thousands) released 1893-August 1903 is in the IMDb, and every American feature released 1912-1920 is there, too.
> I can tell you this: Every American film (thousands) released 1893-August 1903
> is in the IMDb, and every American feature released 1912-1920 is there, too.
I withdrew my comment “They aren’t even that good on older American films” in my later post when I wrote that “On the other hand, the listing for old silent American films is better than I expected.”
? I mean, it’s impossible to watch 35,000 movies in a lifetime for goodness sakes, but anyone with many millions of dollars could own them all. That would be so sweet… *
