This question is somewhat inspired by the American Dad episode "Stan Time", where a pill is invented that replaces sleep. A character who takes the pill mentions that he's using it to watch every movie ever. For years I've wondered whether this is even humanly possible, so I've decided to try and find out.
Firstly, we must define what qualifies as a movie. For the purposes of this experiment, I will be using the following guidelines:
- The runtime must be above 40 minutes. This is the definition of "feature-length" used by the Academy Awards.
- The film must have a page on IMDB. It would be near impossible to get a sense of the number of student films created that never get distributed, so specifically limits the list to films that have had public releases. This is in keeping with the spirit of the question, as it assumes that a random person is watching the movies, meaning they must be available.
- Any genre is acceptable. This includes documentaries, which have been Oscar-eligible since 1942. One controversial inclusion is adult films, which have been added for the sake of completion. While this is a controversial decision, this only contributes around 1/41 of the entire list, making it fairly negligible.
- The film must be released on or before 2019. This question assumes that the person has created a list of films to watch this year, and intends to complete just these films. Obviously, once this is done, there would be more many more films to watch. However, this question is exclusively rooted in the present day to avoid speculation wherever possible.
Running these runtime, and genre parameters into IMDB with an advanced search that contains no keywords, we receive a list of 246,037 feature films.
Next, the average runtime of a film must be determined. For this, a sample of 100 movies was taken from the list, and their runtimes were added to a table. The sample was taken from around 5,000 films into the list, with the list set to alphabetical. Setting the search to alphabetical ensures that there is no bias towards newer films, which could skew the calculations compared to "Release Date", "User Rating" or "Popularity".
The reason the measurement was taken 5,000 films into the list was one again to prevent modern bias. The list opens with films starting with the hash (#) symbol, which is so prevalent in social media that almost all films in the opening section are 21st-century films.
Collectively, the 100 movies sampled had a runtime of 8277 minutes. Dividing this by 100 gives an average runtime of 82.77 minutes. Multiplying this number by the number of films in the database gives a total runtime of 20,364,482.49 minutes.
This translates to the following:
- 20,364,482.49 Minutes
- 339,408.04 Hours
- 14,142 Days
- 38.7452 Years
While this figure should be humanly possible (assuming at least half of your life is spent doing this), there could be potential ways to lower this figure. Firstly, the film itself could be sped up. A speed of 1.5x makes a film considerably faster to watch while still allowing the speech to be interpretable. This would bring the figure down to 25.83 years.
Next, it would also be theoretically possible to watch two movies at once. If one movie is set to audio while the other is subtitled, it would be possible to read the subtitles while listening to the audio and occasionally glancing at the film with sound on. This would naturally half the runtime.
If both of these tactics are used, it would allow this person to theoretically watch every movie ever made in 12.915 years.
This answer surprised me, as it indicates that even with sleep, it would be theoretically possible to "complete" movies in your lifetime. Assuming that a person survives on 6 hours sleep per day, this would only increase the runtime to 16.143 years.
In fact, the average human would not even have to change their sleeping and working schedule to complete movies. Assuming that the average splits their life into third, which 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep and 8 hours play, this gives a timescale of 38.745 years. This isn't even including holidays and weekends, which could be used to further run down the clock if the person wished.
tl;dr: All movies in history have a collective runtime of 38.7452 years. With a few tweaks, this can be watched in 12.915 years, and a person with a healthy schedule could finish it in 38.745 years.
Maybe skip The Last Airbender though.