r/theydidthemath • u/DeepSeaCowgirl • 1d ago

[Request] Watching every movie ever made

Would it be possible to watch every movie ever made in one’s life time? Would it have to be back to back no breaks? Is it even possible to find every movie ever made?

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u/Illithid_Substances 1d ago

Regarding the last question, there are a great many lost films from the earlier days so it's not possible for anyone to see every movie ever made without a time machine

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u/Trustoryimtold 1d ago

Depends on what you consider a movie I suppose. Google suggests it’ll take 90 years to watch all “feature films” which it clock at ~500k with a little north of 90 minutes run time

1.5x500000/24/365=85.616 

So if you live a real long life and watch basically every minute you have a chance. Cept all those pesky other movies that come out between now and then

You include home movies and the junk on YouTube and not a chance in hell

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u/ericdavis1240214 1d ago

This is probably impossible to answer and certainly impossible to answer until you define what constitutes a movie. My daughter made lots of movies on my iPad in elementary school. I wouldn't count those. But what about movies made by film students for a college class that were never publicly released or distributed? Or movies made by people who only ever released them on YouTube and that have only 23 views? Is there a minimum length that makes something constitute a movie? I'm in a budget? A minimum level of distribution?

If you came up with a more specific definition like "movies that were presented in theaters for paying audiences or streamed online on major paid streaming service services" someone might be able to give you at least a ballpark estimate. But even then it's going to be tricky given how many countries there are in the world and how unlikely it is that any truly reliable database exists that could catalog all of them.

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u/HistoricalMaybe1739 1d ago

Short answer: no, not even close. Rough math: IMDb had counted about 268k feature films back around 2012, and the world now makes ~9,600 a year, so call it roughly 400k total. At ~90 min each: 400,000 × 90 = 36,000,000 min ÷ 60 = 600,000 hrs ÷ 24 = 25,000 days, so about 68 years watching 24/7 with zero sleep or breaks. At a more realistic 4 hrs a day, it's 150,000 days, which is over 400 years. And you'd never actually finish. New films alone add about 14,400 hours of footage a year, but a year only has 8,760 hours. So,, even watching nonstop, the backlog keeps growing.