One thing this email tells me, which I already knew, is that I reviewed 0 films on Letterboxd in 2025. I'm sure this is very disappointing to Letterboxd and I know it is disappointing to some people who follow me on Letterboxd and use that site for its review function more than I do. (They could hardly use it less.) Truth is, I already have two other forums for reviewing movies, if you can say that some of the writing I do on The Audient can be considered movie reviewing, so I leave the pithy Letterboxd takedowns to the unwashed masses who do not have those other forums. I use the site to log my viewings and to submit star ratings, plus to keep lists, most of which are private.
And it was the logging movies portion of my Year in Review that made me realize I had miscounted the number of movies I watched during the calendar year. As I mentioned in a post two days ago, I thought I had watched exactly 287 new-to-me movies for the second year in a row. But it turns out I'd missed one -- not in the recording of it offline in my Microsoft Word document that I use for that purpose, but in the manual updating of the numerical view count. Letterboxd told me my total was 288, and indeed, that turned out to be absolutely true.
Then I also learned that Sunday is the day I watched the most new movies, with 51. That likely does not mean every Sunday but one, rather, I'm sure I watched more than one on several of those Sundays. That seemed strange to me, but I guess it's the weekend night I'm least likely to be out doing something else, and most likely to still want to hang on to the weekend with one more "fun" thing before the week starts again.
The next piece of information I thought was interesting was that Paul Schrader was my most watched director of 2025. This is because I saw two Paul Schrader films: Oh, Canada and Hardcore. In a year where I was not watching the work of one particular director for one of my blogging series, it makes sense that two would be the maximum number of films I'd seen by any director, though I know there was at least one other: Dan Trachtenberg, whose two 2025 Predator films were both watched by me. (Don't forget Predator: Killer of Killers, the lesser known animated film.) Since I did also watch one new-to-me film written by Schrader, which was Rolling Thunder, it makes sense that they would have given him the tiebreak, though I know that was not the reason they did so.
My most watched actor is the interesting one because it is Alan Tudyk, the actor more known for his voice than for his face. So to say that I "watched" him a lot in 2025 is not totally accurate, though I did hear him a lot.
He was in four 2025 films that I saw, those being Playdate, Zootopia 2, Superman and The Electric State, the last three of which were all vocal roles. He was also in one 2024 movie that I saw in 2025, which also used only his voice: Moana 2. That last probably put him over the top over any other challengers, though I'm not really in any position to determine who those challengers may have been. Again in a tiebreaker Letterboxd could not have known about, I also saw Tudyk in a TV show, Santa Clarita Diet, as he took over the role of a severed head, first played by Nathan Fillion, in the show's third and final season.
As I was looking through his IMDB to confirm his viewings and to make sure there wasn't another older film of his that I randomly saw in 2025, I at first wondered if he'd been in one of those Asylum movies. You know, like Snakes on a Train or Alien vs. Hunter or Transmorphers. Because here is what I saw:
But then I thought that looked an awful like the actual Zootopia 2 poster. What gives?
Somehow I never knew that Zootopia was not available as a title to be used in some places outside of the U.S., which apparently includes parts or most of Europe, and by extension, Australia. And Australia must be the default region for my IMDB, so when you click into Zootropolis 2, it lists Zootopia 2 only as the "original title."
AI led me expertly through this one, as I am reluctant to report AI usually is able to do these days.
Apparently there is a Danish zoo called Zootopia, and this zoo already has rights within the EU -- which the UK was still a part of in 2016 -- for trademark and marketing. But it gets even stranger than that, because Zootropolis also has a conflict within Germany specifically, where the movie is known as "Zoomania."
What AI appears to get wrong is that Zootopia 2 is called Zootropolis 2 in Australia. Even though I said my IMDB must be defaulting to my region, which is why the title is presented this way, I know this was not how it appeared on marquees here when I saw it with my son the weekend it came out. Just to be sure I had not had some kind of episode with my perception, where my mind was expecting a certain series of words and so just translated it without my even thinking about it, I checked current cinemas where it is still playing, and they definitely have it lised as Zootopia 2.
In any case, Alan Tudyk is in it, and that made five Tudyk movies in 2025.
I've seen three movies so far in 2026, so that means the likes of Alec Baldwin, Marlon Wayans, Frances Fisher, Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Thandiwe Newton, Steve Zahn and Ice Cube are all the early frontrunners for 2026.
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