The 100 Movie Challenge

Last year I had an idea based on watching a book youtuber when I was looking for some new book recommendations and she mentioned she was trying to read 100 books in a year. That is 1000000% impossible for me to contemplate, If I manage 10 books in a year I’m doing well, but I liked the idea of converting it to movies. After a year, did we succeed or not?

The premise of her book challenge was to read 100 different books in a year, they could have been books that she’d read before, or they could be new – all that counted was that you if you re-read a book more than once in the year then it only counted once. I basically converted that idea with movies and we had the rule that we had to have watched the movie together, otherwise it didn’t count. I wanted to do the challenge because I felt like I had to watch the same ten marvel films with a sprinkling of Pitch Perfect when I got my way over and over. Around summer time we were sure we weren’t going to hit the goal, but winter time rolled round and after finally finishing prison break it opened up our evenings to catch up by watching movies. But we actually smashed it with 108 movies watched.

I know 100 films sounds like a lot, and it is – but we rarely do anything in the evenings after work due to my commute home, and we also don’t like leaving the dogs at home in the evenings in their kennels, so inevitably we spend a lot of time at home.

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3 Standout (for any reason!) films of the year:

Mine

1. Passengers – thought this film was really well done an the Chemistry between Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence was fabulous

2. Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them – I was really pleased in the way the Harry Potter Franchise was bought back and found the story line completely refreshing. I’m already looking forward to the next ones in the series.

3. Zootropolis – Thought this was a brilliant amimated movie. Now have it on Blu-ray and definitely planning on watching this in the new year.

Honorable Mention: Kingsman Secret Service

Ben

1. Star Wars Rogue One – The main characters are very good, particularly Felicity Jones. Felt like it filled in a gap for fans of the original series in a way that wasn’t intrusive on the original movies as well as being a good standalone story.

2. Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them -An excellent extension to the Harry Potter universe, all of the main cast and characters were very good, with quite brilliant special effects.

3. The Intern – Felt very real and was really quite uplifting – but in a non cheesy way. Felt like someone had felt about the message that they wanted to portray and tried to stay as true to real life as possible.

Honorable Mention: The Peanuts Movie


Biggest Disappointment of the Year

Mine

Finding Dory – I love Finding Nemo an obscene amount and it just didn’t live up to expectations. No where near as funny as the first and also minorly depressing.

Ben

Finding Dory – Finidng Nemo was unique in it’s concept was unique in it’s concept and an adventure. But Finding Dory focussed too much on Dory’s disability and how it was treated and represented. Written by people who didn’t appreciate what was good about Finding Nemo


This year we’ve decided to try and do it again – although with lots of stuff to still do pre-wedding and 3 weeks off work for the wedding I imagine it might be really hard this year to manage it. We’ve decided to mix it up and set 5 categories of movies to try and watch ten movies each from, with the other fifty just being everything. We decided to to do this to help broaden our movie watching even further and picked categories we might not necessarily be our first picks to watch things from.

1. Films Pre-2000 (exc Disney!)

2. Musicals

3. Indie Films

4. Thriller

5. Movies Based On Books


Our 2016 Watched List

Home (1st January)
The Terminal (1st January)
Kingsman Secret Service (2nd January)
Star Wars Attack of the Clones (2nd January)
How to Train Your Dragon (3rd January)
Unfinished Business (3rd January)
Star Wars Revenge of the Sith (4th January)
Get Hard (8th January)
Spongebob Squarepants The Movie (9th January)
Guardians of the Galaxy (15th January)
Paddington (23rd January)
Galaxy Quest (23rd January)
Tomorrowland (29th January)
The Good Dinosaur (1st February)
Woman in Gold (7th February)
Up (12th February)
Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit (19th February)
Fast and Furious 7 (4th March)
Mad Max Fury Road (5th March)
Best Marigold Hotel 2 (12th March)
Focus (14th March)
I Love You Man (20th March)
Ride Along (24th March)
Spooks: The Great and the Good (25th March)
Inside Out (27th March)
The Age of Adelaine (27th March)
The Book of Eli (27th March)
The Martian (28th March)
Jurassic Park III (3rd April)
Jurassic World (9th April)
How to Train Your Dragon 2 (9th April)
The Jungle Book (23rd April)
Now You See Me (2nd May)
Ted 2 (8th May)
Southpaw (13th May)
Captain America Civil War (14th May)
Hot Persuit (20th May)
Star Wars The Force Awakens (22nd May)
White Chicks (29th May)
Twilight (30th May)
The Do-Over (31st May)
Twilight New Moon (3rd June)
Twilight Eclipse (11th June)
Twilight Breaking Dawn (12th June)
Deadpool (25th June)
Red Eye (26th June)
The Big Short (2nd July)
Spy (3rd July)
Vacation (15th July)
Paper Towns (22nd July)
Finding Dory (6th August)
Allegiant (7th August)
The Peanuts Movie (7th August)
Batman vs Superman (15th August)
A Scouts Guide to a Zombie Apocolypse (18th August)
The Man from UNCLE (21st August)
Suicide Squad (28th August)
Zootropolis (29th August)
The Maze Runner Scorch Trials (4th September)
Doc Hollywood (11th September)
Ant Man (11th September)
Hotel Transylvania 2 (18th September)
Gangs of New York (19th September)
The Intern (1st October)
Daddy’s Home (2nd October)
Victor Frankenstein (14th October)
Sisters (15th October)
The Girl on the Train (16th October)
The Fundamentals of Caring (18th October)
Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2 (22nd October)
Grimsby (23rd October)
Doctor Strange (30th October)
Goosebumps (30th October)
Mission Impossible Rogue Nation (8th November)
Steve Jobs (12th November)
The Memoirs of an International Assassin (15th November)
The Danish Girl (19th November)
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (20th November)
Ride Along 2 (20th November)
Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone (21st November)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (25th November)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (28th November)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (29th November)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (3rd December)
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (5th December)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (5th December)
Dirty Grandpa (5th December)
Pocahontas (5th December)
The Night Before (5th December)
What’s Your Number (6th December)
Christmas with the Kranks (7th December)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (9th December)
Hairspray Live (10th December)
We’re The Millers (11th December)
Star Trek Beyond (18th December)
Hail, Caesar! (19th December)
Star Wars Rogue One (19th December)
Now You See Me 2 (19th December)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (21st December)
How to Be Single (23rd December)
Midnight Special (24th December)
Bad Neighbours 2 (24th December)
Passengers (27th December)
The Money Monster (27th December)
Kung Fu Panda 3 (29th December)
Love, Rosie (30th December)
The Secret Life of Pets (31st December)


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Leave me your film recommendations below on your favourites that we should try!

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Helpless Whilst Drying

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36 Comments

  1. January 2, 2017 / 1:35 pm

    Sounds like a great idea, really like the groups you’re doing and watching things you wouldn’t normally, great way to change up the movies you’d normally watch. I don’t think I could do 100 movies or books, though I’m going to try and do a book a week again this year, I failed last year but it’s still a fun goal.

  2. January 2, 2017 / 1:58 pm

    This is really cool may have to keep track of the movies I watch in 2017 to see how many I watch x

    • January 2, 2017 / 3:50 pm

      It’s a fun way to remind yourself of movies you’ve loved at the end of the year too. We were looking through the list picking out of favourites like “oh yeahhhh!”

  3. January 2, 2017 / 4:27 pm

    Wow, I love this post! As soon as I read it I went running to my husband shouting “WE NEED TO DO THIS!!!!” It sounds like a really fun challenge and I think we will give participating a shot this year! I think to start we’re both going to write down a list of movies we want to watch because I find half the battle of watching a movie is picking one!

    • January 2, 2017 / 4:36 pm

      Yes good plan! I’m planning to make our way through a DVD drawer we have of ones we’ve bought and never watched, I knew some of them have been in there for about 3/4 years! 😬

  4. January 2, 2017 / 5:09 pm

    Love this. I hardly watched any films last year so I’ve been meaning to watch more. 100 is a lot so you did well 😊 x

  5. January 2, 2017 / 5:53 pm

    This is such a good idea! I am definitely not a big book reader either so the book challenge wouldn’t be for me either! I definitely need to start watching more movies too so I love this!

      • January 4, 2017 / 3:36 pm

        Definitely, I am the same! I love reading when I’m away but it’s the last thing I want to do at home!

          • January 4, 2017 / 3:52 pm

            Hahaha! I sadly don’t have the dog excuse, I just never have the patience at home lol!

  6. January 2, 2017 / 7:17 pm

    This is honestly so good! I love this idea! I reckon I watch 100 movies a year without even noticing it. Maybe I’ll give this a go! 😀

  7. January 2, 2017 / 9:10 pm

    My SO and I were inspired by you and will be doing a 50 movies goal for 2017. It’s peanuts compared to your 100 for 2016 but we also have a ton of TV shows to binge watch (we’re just going through Sopranos right now). I actually retroactively noted down all the movies we watched in 2016 (from memory as much as possible) and we hit around 35 movies last year. Likely more since we watched a lot of movies on TV.
    My top 3 were: The Lobster, Arrival, and Deadpool. Most disappointing was: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    We saw Passengers last week and even though the reviews were terrible, we didn’t hate it.
    It’s interesting that they renamed ‘Zootopia’ to ‘Zootropolis’ for the UK market. 😛 I haven’t seen it but it’s on my list!

    • January 2, 2017 / 9:26 pm

      I want to see the lobster and arrival! I didn’t like deadpool at all though, also didn’t like Batman vs super man!
      The reviews of passengers here wasn’t that bad, I really enjoyed it and I’m not normally into anything ‘spacey’!
      Yes of course meant to put that zootropolis was called zootopia in the us, I think it’s changed because of something already being registered in that name here!
      50 is still a feat, were about to start watching the American office, I’ve seen it before (all but the last 5 episodes before they removed it from Netflix here) but I just bought the box set over Christmas and Ben hasn’t seen it before!

  8. January 3, 2017 / 1:26 am

    This sounds like a great idea! I have never been a big movie watcher but should really watch more.

  9. January 3, 2017 / 2:15 am

    Wow, I’m so impressed that you watched 100 movies in a year! We hardly watched any movies last year – it would be a wonder if we even watched 30 😛 I’m inspired by this…I don’t know if we’ll challenge ourselves to watch a certain number of movies/read a certain number of books in 2017, but I’d like to at least keep track of what we watch and read this year.

  10. January 3, 2017 / 2:22 am

    We watched a lot of the same movies last year! I definitely agree, Passengers was amazing, a total standout for me! I also loved the Intern and quite a few others on your list! I have yet to see Fantastic Beasts but I’m waiting until I read the book so I’ll wait until I can watch it at home. This is an awesome idea, I think I might do it for this year!

  11. January 3, 2017 / 7:47 am

    Haha that’s so brilliant and I actually just used this to find a film to watch! Any other recommendations I’ve seen your favourites and loved them too xx

  12. lizzgold
    January 3, 2017 / 7:46 pm

    This is awesome! I’m gonna do this starting tonight!

  13. January 7, 2017 / 4:53 pm

    Well, there goes my plans for the next 100 days. Thank you SO much for the idea… (Even if we totally disagree on Finding Dory!)

    • January 7, 2017 / 5:40 pm

      Ahh man did you love it? I think my expectations were higher than any other movie I’ve probably been to see and I think it would probably always have disappointed me somewhat!

      • January 7, 2017 / 5:43 pm

        Don’t get me wrong – it was the most unnecessary sequel in movie history – expect Finding Hank in 2022. But it was just fun, colourful and just a pretty delightful watch. I promise I won’t judge you (too much) for not liking it!

  14. January 11, 2017 / 5:15 pm

    This is such a great challenge. I will definitely have to do it!

  15. January 19, 2017 / 2:58 pm

    Oh no, I loved Finding Dory….

  16. Now Thats a Movie Review
    February 9, 2017 / 12:21 am

    Great Review Come Check Out Some of Our’s!

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