There were two movies on my current watchlist that were also available on my Emirates flights, at least two, that I wanted to see a lot more than any of these: Opus and Friendship. But I decided -- on the first leg of my trip, when Opus was already available but Friendship not yet -- that I wasn't going to watch Opus because I was saving it for a more clear-eyed viewing.
I don't actually know that much about Opus and whether it's worth saving for a more opportune (Opus-tune?) time. Just a feeling I got that it might be a shame to waste it on the plane. With Friendship, I'm actually saving it for a very specific occasion. We tried to schedule a date with another couple to watch it in the cinema, but when that fell through I proposed the four of us watch it at our house after dinner, sometime this month after we returned from our trip. I'm not sure whether or not that will still happen, but it might.
I'm really telling you this, though, because it illustrates that I divide movies into two categories: movies I want to give my best and fullest attention, and movies I don't care if I watch while succumbing to a dozen bouts of involuntary sleep. (Don't worry, I always pause. Even sleep cannot overcome that powereful instinct.)
That may go without saying. And it may explain why movies I watch on the plane don't end up ranking very high on my year-end list. I simply reserve that time for movies I don't think I'll care very much about, so I don't worry that I might have a compromised experience.
But one of the joys of watching movies is that you make discoveries. You see movies you didn't have much reason to anticipate, or in some cases had never even heard of, and they end up becoming personal favorites, making it into the upper echelon of the films you watched in that particular year.
Given the number of trips I've made back and forth between the Australia and the U.S., and between Australia and other parts of the world, surely this should have happened a few times?
But just casually thinking back on movies I watched on planes, a lot more of them have plots I don't really remember than a special place on my mental shelf of all-time favorites.
It's hard to develop a full causal relationship here. Because I don't know what films I'm going to end up loving until after I've already seen them, there's no way to intentionally hold back a potential favorite just so you can test the theory by watching it on the plane. Or rather, I just had the opportunity with Opus and Friendship but I refused to risk sacrificing them.
For one, most of us don't travel enough for that sort of testing to be practical. But also, you can't really tell, retrospectively, if you've just had and missed such an opportunity, because you can't know if you would have liked a particular movie significantly more outside of the plane viewing context. You'd only be asking this question about movies you didn't like, and you can't see a movie twice for the first time.
I do wonder if, for example, I would have had just as much affection for last year's #1 -- The Substance -- if I'd seen it on the plane. Maybe it's too gross to show on the plane, but let's say it had been available there. Would I still have loved it? Or would it just be another among a bunch of films I can't really remember?
I don't think there's really a way to test this. The best I can do is go back through my ranking years to see which plane movie ranked highest that year, out of what total number of movies I saw on a plane that year. That'll not only tell me how many plane viewings were middling experiences in those years, but also give me a total number of plane movies to help see if there is any possible statistical significance to raising up so few of them into the highest end of my rankings.
I might be able to extrapolate something from this. I might not. But either way, I think it's an exercise worth doing.
I don't think it makes sense for me to consider every year I've ranked my films, which goes back to 1996. Many of those early years, I might have seen only one or two movies on a plane, some years none at all. Remember, back then, the movies didn't play in seatbacks, and often you even had to pay to opt in to the communal movie by renting headsets. That explains the famous case of 1997, my second ranking year, when I "saw" Speed 2: Cruise Control on a plane, and ranked it last that year. The thing is, I hadn't opted in. I'd only been watching the images. Without even listening to it, I have no idea how I thought it could legitimately be ranked. I've issued my mea culpa about this before. Anyway, obviously I wasn't really doing it right in those years, even if I was actually seeing movies that might otherwise be worth considering here.
So I'll start with 2007, the first year I traveled to Australia, and then jump ahead to 2009 for my next Australian trip. I'll pick up again with 2013, because that's when I moved to Australia, and from that point on, most years have had enough plane movies to produce statistically significant results.
Except I can't do 2007, because my plane flights that year were in March. Meaning only movies that belonged to a different ranking year were available to be watched. This exercise may be even more flawed or lacking in useful results than I thought.
Well, my flights for the 2009 ranking year were in December of 2009 and January of 2010, so I know at least we can start there. So I'll just start there and list only the years where there are movies to list.
2009
Rankable movies watched on plane: 9
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: The Proposal (50th out of 113, 56%)
Others: Duplicity (#67), Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (#76), Jennifer's Body (#72), Land of the Lost (#96), Michael Jackson's This Is It (#51), Paper Heart (#102), Post Grad (#98), The Time Traveler's Wife (#56)
Notes: Yes, this is all from two flights -- and it should have been more, except I didn't totally have my airplane movie game established on the first flight, watching two movies (Last Chance Harvey and A Christmas Tale) that weren't rankable for 2009. So yes, that also means I watched seven movies on my trip back to Los Angeles, a record that will never be broken, and was likely only possible because my wife stayed back and returned separately a few days later. Had she been by my side, watching me get no sleep, I probably would not have been able to justify it. Although none of these films ranked particularly high in the year I saw them, I have actually gone on to watch The Proposal twice more, including once in the past year, meaning it has become a long-term favorite -- or at least a guilty pleasure -- from these meager origins.
2013
Rankable movies watched on plane: 3
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Much Ado About Nothing (27th out of 128, 79%)
Others: The Call (#71), The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (#127)
Notes: With only a single flight in this year -- remember, this was the year I moved to Australia -- it hardly seems worth including it. And obviously I was exhausted after a frantic move out of my house in Los Angeles, meaning I only managed to watch three movies. But one of them fared pretty well at least. Then one of them was my second-to-worst of the year.
2014
Rankable movies watched on plane: 11
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Begin Again (19th out of 136, 86%)
Others: Belle (#45), Earth to Echo (#103), The Fault in Our Stars (#61), How to Train Your Dragon 2 (#68), Magic in the Moonlight (#36), Maleficent (#83), Tammy (#107), These Final Hours (#72), What We Do in the Shadows (#41), Wish I Was Here (#101)
Notes: The reason we're not talking about records in 2014 is that this is the first time we also took a trip with long internal domestic flights, from the west coast of the U.S. to the east coast, in which I squeezed in an additional three movies beyond the four each way I watched between Australia and the U.S. This was an extended Thanksgiving trip. Here again we have a movie I've watched about twice more since I originally saw it in What We Do in the Shadows. Obviously seeing it on the plane did not prevent me from finding it hilarious. But more notable is that I ranked one of these movies in my top 20, with many other very respectable rankings sprinkled in. Since Begin Again was John Carney's follow-up to Once, which had been a #2 movie for me, it was reasonable that I would have reserved this for a viewing outside the plane environment, except I think I'd already heard not great things about it. What We Do is the one that has gone on to be a personal favorite, and it's only the third highest of these. So by the third year we've looked at, already my initial premise about the negative effect of watching a movie on a plane is seeming pretty flawed.
2016
Rankable movies watched on plane: 13
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Other People (7th out of 151, 95%)
Others: The Birth of a Nation (#49), The Boss (#59), Florence Foster Jenkins (#90), Lights Out (#135), Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (#111), Love & Friendship (#78), Nerve (#46), Queen of Katwe (#67), The Secret Life of Pets (#129), Storks (#113), Sunset Song (#72), X-Men: Apocalypse (#105)
Notes: No trip to the U.S in 2015, and in fact, that was the first year of my life in which I never once set foot on American soil. But we were back at the end of 2016, for Christmas this time, fresh off the dispiriting election loss by Hilary Clinton to Donald Trump. I suspect these 13 will be a record that will stand* for the total number of movies watched on a plane and then ranked, as it involves not only an additional fifth movie on one of the two long flights, but two each on the two long coast-to-coast flights. And there's a notable asterisk here, though I don't know if it is a real asterisk or not so we will have to discuss. Other People will clearly be the highest ranked movie I've ever seen on a plane, making it into my top ten. However ... this is a movie I had downloaded to whatever device I was carrying at the time, likely a laptop, not one I picked from the seatback options. I had selected it as a possibility to watch at some point on the trip, not knowing whether it would get watched on the plane or at some other time. Does that make a difference for this exercise? I'm going to say no and include it because it did indeed get watched in the plane environment, which is what we're talking about here -- and I'm pretty sure it's the only time a movie I've watched on a plane has left me bawling like a baby**. This was even among my honorable mentions for the best of the decade, so obviously it was not just a reaction in the moment. However, because it was one of those I watched on one of our domestic flights, it likely did benefit from not being the middle of five movies in a row, nor coming in the middle of the night.
* - 2019, 2024 and 2025 will all beat it
** - read on
2017
Rankable movies watched on plane: 2
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Going in Style (82nd out of 145, 43%)
Others: Paris Can Wait (#140)
Notes: No international flight this year, but a trip to the Northern Territory in August did allow me to fit in two rankable movies. (I sacrificed one viewing slot on a movie that came out the previous year, Masterminds.) With only two movies, it's hard to draw anything significant from this.
2018
Rankable movies watched on plane: 11
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: The Death of Stalin (18th out of 149, 88%)
Others: American Animals (#78), Damsel (#113), The Death of Stalin (#18), Foxtrot (#23), The Insult (#89), Kings (#121), Life of the Party (#135), Love, Simon (#26), On Chesil Beach (#87), Swinging Safari (#77), Tag (#51)
Notes: The occasion for this flight was to surprise my mother for her 75th birthday, which makes this also the shortest international flight I've ever taken, only seven days from departure to return. (In fact, I remember it being less than that, but it must not have been.) So ten movies on four flights within seven days ... that's a lot. (Swinging Safari was the only rankable film watched on a shorter trip when my wife and I went to Bali for a week for our tenth anniversary.) Anyway, the premise of this post, and even a premise established within this post just a moment ago, keeps getting dashed. Here we have another top 20 movie from my airplane viewings, one of two movies in this group (along with Tag) that I've now watched twice. And we also have a movie that made me cry, or at least brought me close to tears, in Love, Simon, on the heels of me just saying that I thought Other People was the only movie that had done that. Simon is just one of three airplane movies ranked in the top 30 this year. So yeah, my bias against an airplane as a place to watch movies is getting less and less credible as I go through this exercise.
2019
Rankable movies watched on plane: 18
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Yesterday (41st out of 146, 72%)
Others: The Art of Self-Defense (#110), Cold Pursuit (#100), The Curse of La Llorona (#132), Dumbo (#141), Five Feet Apart (#76), Hellboy (#131), The Kid Who Would Be King (#47), Kursk (#64), Late Night (#67), Little (#98), Missing Link (#119), Stuber (#145), Sword of Trust (#42), Top End Wedding (#115), The White Crow (#82), Where'd You Go, Bernadette (#106), X-Men: Dark Phoenix (#128), Yesterday (#41)
Notes: And now we can see that I only find X-Men movies suitable to watch on planes, as the most recent one (to date) makes the second consecutive one I watched this way. The first trip was relatively unique in our trips to America as it included no east coast portion (my family met us in California) and it involved an uneven number of long flights, as our trip home was broken up by a trip to Hawaii. Then there was an unplanned trip later in the year to help move my mother into a retirement home, where I scored a bunch more viewings. (I laugh that I once thought the 13 from 2016 would be a record and I have since gone back and added an asterisk, which you have already read.)
2022
Rankable movies watched on plane: 10
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Kimi (30th out of 175, 83%)
Others: Ambulance (#139), Asking for It (#162), Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (#108), Father Stu (#144), Firestarter (#151), Kimi (#30), Marry Me (#149), Scream (#93), Sundown (#113), Umma (#150)
Notes: We returned to the air after a couple flightless COVID years. So this trip had five legs, each of which included at least one movie, as we went to a family reunion in Indiana, visited other family and friends in New England, and then spent some time in Los Angeles before heading back to Australia. There were actually two other movies watched on these flights, but one was for my Audient Bollywood series and not a 2022 release, and another I thought qualified for 2022, but later decided was actually a 2021 movie. Here we see my bias starting to take over and run, and we have to ask if it's starting to be self-fulfilling prophecies to watch movie I know I might not like. Only one of these ten movies has a decent showing and only two are in my top 100 for the year.
2023
Rankable movies watched on plane: 3
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Carmen (53rd out of 168, 68%)
Others: Carmen (#53), Linoleum (#134), The Pope's Exorcist (#100)
Notes: Our international trip to Vietnam did not produce any rankable movies, since it was in April and there were no 2023 movies available yet, but a September trip to Broome in the other corner of Australia was happy to fill in the gap. The three movies basically yielded one final ranking from each of the three thirds of my chart, though I only barely got one in the top third.
2024
Rankable movies watched on plane: 14
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Problemista (24th out of 177, 86%)
Others: Am I OK? (#132), Back to Black (#120), Bob Marley: One Love (#121), The Critic (#47), Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (#123), Janet Planet (#172), Kneecap (#34), Lee (#133), Mean Girls (#157), Mothers' Instinct (#167), Problemista (#24), Summer Camp (#162), Turtles All the Way Down (#87), We Grown Now (#75)
Notes: I guess flying in April of 2024 to the Northern Territory (going to some of the same places we went in 2017) did not provide me the same complication as flying to Vietnam in April of 2023, because I was able to squeak in January release Mean Girls. There were two others from a quick trip to Singapore in October, and then we capped an epic travel year with our second trip to New England for Christmas, first since 2016. And though there are a lot of bad movies in here, there are two in my top 40.
If I were including 2025 in this -- which I obviously can't because I haven't ranked those films yet -- I'd be tying my record for 18 total rankable movies (from 2019), due to the most plane flying I've ever done in one year, by hours. Our July round trip to the U.S. and our various legs just now through Europe have produced those 18 titles, including one Netflix movie watched on a tablet, not to mention three from other years and one rewatch (a thing I rarely do, though I did also rewatch Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood on a plane in 2019, actually liking it much better on this second viewing -- which itself could be useful information). As I write this, I have not yet even included any of the movies I watched on the most recent trip to my in-progress 2025 rankings -- some of them will undoubtedly fare well.
One thing I should say, though, is that one of the films from other years I watched back in July was I'm Still Here, which I wrote about here. In a way, this was actually the test that I talked about not being able to do earlier in this post, even though I won't have the result in terms of a current year ranking.
I'm Still Here was the only best picture nominee from last year that I had not seen by the time of the Oscar ceremony, and in July I took the opportunity to watch it so I could erase that blind spot as well as write the next entry in my Audient Bridesmaids series, which you noted if you followed the link above. So here we have a movie with a high pedigree, but one that maybe I would not have prioritized watching as soon as I watched it if I had not gotten that easy opportunity on the plane. Sing Sing is another movie available on my recent plane rides that would have fit that description, if I'd chosen to watch it. I think I was willing to test this on I'm Still Here because it wouldn't impact my current year rankings, which somehow seems of paramount importance.
But you know what? I still gave I'm Still Here 4.5 stars on Letterboxd. It's a great movie, obviously, but I can say pretty confidently that I wouldn't have gone all the way to 5 stars, even if I'd first encountered it on the big screen.
So what have I learned from all this?
I think the most important takeaway is that a good movie is a good movie. I should not be scared of "ruining" it by watching it on the plane. A plane cannot turn a good movie into bad one, though I suppose it's possible to affect the degree I would like or dislike it. That, I think, is not possible to test.
In the ten years I looked at, a movie I watched on the plane was in my top quarter of ranked movies in six of those years, so more than half. Three years produced a top 20 movie and one of those three produced a top ten movie.
So I think there is no reasonable excuse to deny myself watching whatever movie I find on the plane that's escaped me for one reason or another. I might want to stack the deck in its favor by watching it first, especially on a flight where I may watch four others, before I'm burned out. But that's just good sense.
And besides, the reality remains: If I'd really wanted to see the movie, badly, I would have already prioritized seeing it in the theater. And that may be the ultimate explanation for why movies I watch on the plane don't rank higher, when they don't: They weren't from a director I felt I needed to prioritize when his or her movie was available on the big screen. On each flight, I have already passively curated these movies into a subsection of also-rans. The fact that some of them do still rise up and become personal favorites reminds me why I try to go into each movie with an open mind and an open heart, and restores some of my faith in the ability of cinema to surprise me.
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