My year in movies in theaters, using Fandango > My Orders > History, my Swarm Timeline, and personal recollection, to aggregate a few lists and stats:
I saw 9 new movies in theaters in 2025, two of them multiple times (dates are first viewing)
* 2025-02-20 👹 Captain America: Brave New World
* 2025-05-22 ℹ️ Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
* 2025-07-20 🦸🏻♂️ Superman (2025)
* 2025-07-26 ⓸ The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
* 2025-10-09 🔻 Tron: Ares
* 2025-11-15 🏃🏻♂️ The Running Man (2025)
* 2025-11-19 🧌 Predator: Badlands
* 2025-12-03 🪄 Now You See Me: Now You Don’t
* 2025-12-14 🧹 Wicked: For Good
In these cities:
* 11x San Francisco
* Berlin
* Boston
* San Diego
At the following movie theaters:
* 6x AMC Metreon Dolby
* 2x AMC Metreon IMAX
* Zoo Palast
* Alamo Drafthouse SF HDR BARCO
* AMC Boston Common IMAX
* Regal Stonestown Galleria ScreenX
* Regal Stonestown Galleria
* AMC Mission Valley 20
In the following formats, in rough order of frequency then features/quality:
* 5x Dolby
* 2x IMAX
* 2x Standard
* 3D IMAX
* 3D Dolby
* HDR BARCO
* ScreenX
* Standard German dub
The latter three were new formats for me this year: HDR BARCO, ScreenX, and Standard German dub.
My preferred movie format is still Dolby, in particular in the Metreon Dolby theater. I’ve been to other “Dolby” theaters (including other AMC Dolby) and none have measured up. Dolby theater audio quality is significantly better than any IMAX theater I have been in.
3D IMAX can look amazing for the right film (e.g. Tron: Ares). In comparison, I was not impressed by 3D Dolby, or any other 3D projection+glasses technologies over the years.
HDR BARCO was very high quality, however, having seen the same film (Tron: Ares, with lots of dark scenes) in both HDR BARCO and Metreon Dolby, I could not see a discernible difference in the visual quality. Perhaps the light pollution from the Alamo Drafthouse's under-table lights interfered with the quality of the HDR BARCO experience.
I archived the page that Alamo Drafthouse had setup for the HDR BARCO Tron: Ares showing:
* https://web.archive.org/web/20251011173709/https://drafthouse.com/sf/event/special-event-tron-ares-hdr-by-barco?cinemaId=0801&sessionId=74102
Unclear why they took the page down.
ScreenX was an entertaining gimmick for the landscapes of Predator: Badlands. I would consider seeing another suitable movie in the format.
Watching a film dubbed in German was an interesting challenge that pushed and exceeded my German speech comprehension skills. I had to use contextual cues, on screen, sci-fi terminology, and the Fantastic Four subject matter to interpret much of it.
I constructed these summary lists by hand, and having completed them, I think next time it might work better to incorporate the raw data into a table with various columns for date, time, film name, theater, auditorium, format, and perhaps more like seat number(s) and the set of us at the viewing. I would not include classic "IMDB" fields like genre, director, writer etc. because all of those are independent of the particular theater/viewing and can easily be looked up on Wikipedia. Duplicating that info in my own personal notes would merely add noise to the signal of each specific movie theater experience.
I’m curious if anyone else has done something like this / is doing this to keep track of the movies they see in theaters, what info to capture about the viewing, what to note about the particular experience, and what to publish on their #indieweb site.
This is post 5 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #yearInReview #yearInMovies #yearInTheaters
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