The Movies I Watched in 2022

January 31 2023 • 16 min read

dataguide

Through 2022 I kept track of most the movies I watched. In this post I’ll talk about how I took that data and, combined with the OMDb API, used the data with Jekyll.

I’m subscribed to Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Disney Plus. The movies I watched show a good mix of all of these services. I found that I would more often use Netflix or Disney Plus when choosing movies to watch with my wife, and Amazon Prime Video for movies that I watched on my own. I watched only one movie at the cinema (The Batman).

Each time I watched a movie, I added an entry to a list in Notion. Later on I went through the list and manually got the IMDB movie ID for each movie. I didn’t record ratings or anything, but it was interesting to me to be able to reference a list when suggesting movies to friends and family.

It looks like I didn’t watch any movies in January or October – this is probably right! In January my son was born, and in October we had a holiday.

In 2023 I’m considering tracking all of the series I watch too.

Presenting a list of movies

To put this post together I’ve used the OMDb API to gather movies details and posters. OMDb provides a simple endpoint that you can pass either a title or IMDB movie ID to and in return get a bunch of data back.

For example you can get the JSON formatted data for a specific movie using it’s IMDB movie ID and save that to a file using cURL:

curl -o _data/movies/2022/tt10298810.json -L -O "https://www.omdbapi.com/?apikey=<API KEY>&i=tt10298810"

This will give you the following:

{"Title":"Lightyear","Year":"2022","Rated":"PG","Released":"17 Jun 2022","Runtime":"105 min","Genre":"Animation, Action, Adventure","Director":"Angus MacLane","Writer":"Angus MacLane, Matthew Aldrich, Jason Headley","Actors":"Chris Evans, Keke Palmer, Peter Sohn","Plot":"While spending years attempting to return home, marooned Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear encounters an army of ruthless robots commanded by Zurg who are attempting to steal his fuel source.","Language":"English","Country":"United States","Awards":"17 nominations","Poster":"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYTg2Zjk0ZTctM2ZmMi00MDRmLWJjOGYtNWM0YjBmZTBjMjRkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTM1MTE1NDMx._V1_SX300.jpg","Ratings":[{"Source":"Internet Movie Database","Value":"6.1/10"},{"Source":"Rotten Tomatoes","Value":"74%"},{"Source":"Metacritic","Value":"60/100"}],"Metascore":"60","imdbRating":"6.1","imdbVotes":"107,450","imdbID":"tt10298810","Type":"movie","DVD":"03 Aug 2022","BoxOffice":"$118,291,449","Production":"N/A","Website":"N/A","Response":"True"}

I then took that JSON into Jekyll. Outputting to the _data/movies/2022/*.json path exposes this to Jekyll’s data like this:

site.data.movies['2022']['tt10298810']

Where you can then read the content, or access any of the properties:

site.data.movies['2022']['tt10298810'].Plot => "While spending years attempting to return home, marooned Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear encounters an army of ruthless robots commanded by Zurg who are attempting to steal his fuel source."

You can easily grab a copy of the movie poster in a similar way:

curl -o tt10298810.jpg -L -O "https://img.omdbapi.com/?apikey=<API KEY>&i=tt10298810"

I’m currently storing the list of movies and the date I watched them in a data file at _data/movies/2022/index.yml. I loop through that list, and then pull in the further movie data from the OMDb JSON files I grabbed earlier (_data/movies/2022/*.json). Once I had all of the movie data from OMDb I wrote a bunch of convoluted Jekyll/Liquid logic in this post to render it as you see below.

With all of the data collected I can do stuff like calculate the amount of time spent watching films in 2022 (72h 34m) 🤷‍♂️

Enough of the technical mumbo jumbo… Here’s the list of movies I watched in 2022: