It shouldn't surprise anyone that I saw far fewer movies in 2020 than I did the year before. I saw just 41 movies in 2020, which is the fewest in any year since I started keeping track.
It also shouldn't surprise anyone how few of those movies I actually saw in a theater: just two for the entire year. (Both were back in January, catching up on 2019 movies that were likely to be in the Oscar hunt, 1917 and Parasite. The latter won Best Picture, so... uh... yeah, it was in the hunt.) If you could have told me at the start of the year that I'd go a movie theater just twice in all of 2020, I actually would have assumed some calamity on the horizon -- probably personal rather than global, but I would have suspected/dreaded it all the same.
It wasn't only "not being able to go out to the movies" that kept my count so low this year. I spent a pretty big chunk of my entertainment time on TV shows instead -- keeping current with favorites, sampling new series, and going back to catch up on a good number of things people buzzed about a while back. Obviously, a season of TV takes longer to get through than a movie. (In the case of a long-running hit, it takes a whole lot longer.) Still, I'd seen fully 1/4 of my movies for the year by the end of February, the widely accepted "end of pre-pandemic times."
Although most major studio films were delayed, plenty of new movies were still released in 2020, often exclusively to one of the many streaming services the pop-culture savvy are now expected to keep. In a way, this wide array of options created a sort of "analysis paralysis" about what to watch. No sooner had I heard about one potentially worthy film than three more would pop up on the radar. So rather than trying my luck on one and hoping for the best, I'd often wind up watching none of them, opting instead for the next episode of Dark, Atypical, The Goes Wrong Show, Harley Quinn, What We Do in the Shadows, Schitt's Creek, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Devs... I believe you get the point. (I thought every one of the shows an A or A-, to say nothing of many more shows I thought almost as good.)
Long story short (too late), I haven't even seen 10 movies yet that were released in 2020. And not all of the ones I did see were good. So the idea of a conventional "Top 10 List" as I usually do doesn't make a lot of sense right now. In a few months, if I make an effort at catching up, maybe. For now, though, it'll be a much more modest "Top 3 List" -- three movies I have seen that would almost certainly still make a Top 10 List even if I'd watched more:
Yes, two of them are Pixar movies. That's just the way it is.
I'll probably revisit this post at some point and revise it into a more conventional Top 10. Maybe you can help in that endeavor by suggesting great 2020 movies you saw. (It'll get me jump-started on a better total count for 2021.)
Updated March 1, 2022:
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