[COLUMN] "Best of" List Season Gets Earlier Every Year | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

 It seems that Christmas comes earlier and earlier every year. At time of publication, it is the 11th of December. There are still twenty days – almost three weeks – left in the year. However, the deluge of end-of-year “best of” lists has already begun.

Just in terms of film, IndieWire published their list before the end of November. The New York Times at least had the restraint to wait until the start of December. Things really kicked into high gear last week, with Vulture announcing their countdown on Monday. Empire released theirs on Thursday, alongside The Washington Post. Sight & Sound went to print on Friday, as did The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian. The Irish Times was comparatively sluggish, releasing their list on Saturday.

It is worth acknowledging that these lists are largely nonsense. They are inherently subjective rankings of individual critics’ favorite films of the past year and are highly variable. Even websites that compile lists from multiple writers – such as The Telegraph – are still just tabulating those inherently subjective rankings from individual critics. Still, given the film world is currently caught up in the height of awards season, it seems churlish to spoil the fun with such a basic observation.

Of course, awards season adds to the complications. There are questions about release windows and what qualifies for a given list, particularly for international publications; Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans featured on the Sight & Sound list for both 2022 and 2023. Even within the United States, many awards contenders stagger their releases in domestic markets, so audiences in the heartland often wait weeks or months to see films that were released on the coasts at the end of the previous year.

More broadly, there’s some peculiarity about the inclusion of films that technically qualify for inclusion on the list without being in wide release when the list is published. Michael Mann’s Ferrari or Blitz Bazawule’s The Color Purple feature on a couple of these lists, but won’t be released until Christmas. Obviously, critics have seen them in advance at press and festival screenings, but it is odd to declare that a film general audiences have yet to see is one of the best of a given year.

As such, there are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to putting together a “best of” list. There are plenty of internal contradictions and ambiguities, even before getting into the inherently subjective nature of these rankings. The fact that these lists are published in late November and early December, rather than in late December or early January, is far from the only potential issue with them. Indeed, there are arguably good reasons to publish these lists a little early.

These lists serve a purpose. The rankings are obviously entirely arbitrary, but these “best of” articles are a potential guide for consumers. They might draw the reader’s attention to a film that they had previously dismissed or completely missed. They could serve as a gentle reminder for a viewer to finally make time to catch up with Oppenheimer or might even be the first time that an audience member hears about a film like How to Blow up a Pipeline.

With that in mind, there’s a logic to publishing these movies ahead of the holidays. Around Christmas and New Year’s, people will finally have time to catch up with the movies that they missed during the earlier hectic months. Indeed, if those viewers want to catch up before the end of a given year, it’s useful to get a list of films to catch as early as possible. It’s likely that many families will choose their festive viewing based on these recommendations.

More broadly, coverage around New Year tends to look forwards rather than backwards. The New Year is about resolutions, promises about what lies ahead. Many of these publications will mark the arrival of 2024 by publishing lists of films “to watch out for” in the months ahead. Given that conventional wisdom suggests that online traffic drops “by around 30-40% during the last week of December and [first] week of January”, it makes sense to shunt those “best of” lists earlier.

Even in practical terms, many critics are finishing up their end-of-year coverage with the hope of spending more time with loved ones over the Christmas break. Organizing a “best of” list takes a reasonable amount of work, particularly if a number of critics are coordinating. Speaking personally and anecdotally, these few weeks are always packed with screenings as distributors try to get as much material in front of critics as possible before awards deadlines and the holiday break. (I’ve seen nine awards contenders in the past six days.)

Still, allowing for these perfectly reasonable and logical justifications, this rush to declare the best movies (and shows and games) feels premature with a twelfth of the release calendar yet to go. It’s tempting to dismiss these objections as mere grinchery, lumping it in with “bah humbug” complaints about how the decorations seem to go up earlier every year. However, it feels like a cheat. There is so much media and so little time. It seems reckless to write off such a significant portion of the year.

One of the dirty little secrets of film and television criticism is that it is impossible to see everything. There were 599 television shows produced in 2022. A critic would have to watch more than one-and-a-half shows every day, allowing for sleep, in order to see everything. Movies are only scarcely more manageable; there were 873 moves released theatrically in 2018, meaning that anybody wanting to keep up has to watch more than two a day.

In reality, no critic watches everything. Many critics have particular niches and interests, and there is an argument that curation is increasingly important in this fragmented media landscape. However, even if a critic only watches 300 or 400 movies in a given year, it seems likely that some of those will be watched during the month of December and they should be given proper consideration in the context of the year in cinema.

More pragmatically, there will always be major releases that will not screen for critics ahead of these deadlines. In some cases, this is a conscious choice on the part of the distribution company, trying to hold back coverage of potential blockbusters by restricting the number of people who see it early. There was a minor controversy over a decade ago around an early screening of David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo that may have made studios cautious about early screenings.

However, in some cases, the films may not be ready to screen yet, particularly if they are special-effects-heavy. It seems safe to assume that few writers composing lists of the best movies of 2023 have seen Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom. Of course, that may be no real tragedy. It has certainly had a troubled production and there’s reason to believe that it could be as bad as The Flash. However, it probably still deserves to be seen and judged on its own merits, even if it is found wanting.

It might be better to pick an example from December 2022. Avatar: The Way of Water only screened for critics in early December. It tended to feature (often high) on lists published later in the month at places like The A.V. Club, Deadline, Strange Harbors, The New York Post and Forbes. It was less likely to rank at publications that released their lists earlier, like The Atlantic or The New York Times, even if the critics making those lists later raved about it. It went on to secure a Best Picture nomination.

There may be a kneejerk rejection of these big blockbusters. It is possible to make an argument that they don’t really need to be considered for these lists, that the primary function of these rankings should be to promote smaller films that the reader may have overlooked or missed. Few people reading these “best of” lists would be unaware of the release of Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom and Avatar: The Way of Water. “There’s already an award for making money,” some might argue.

There’s an inherent snobbishness in this argument, the belief that some movies are more or less deserving than others based simply on their genre or their budget. In an ideal world, critics would approach each film with an open mind and meet them on their own terms. Plenty of blockbusters make these lists, and deservedly so. Oppenheimer and Barbie have performed very well in this round of end-of-year lists. Why not hope for something similar with a December blockbuster?

To a certain extent, this is all inside baseball on a topic that doesn’t really matter. This is a film critic complaining about one of the peculiarities of the business of film criticism. (And twice in the same weekend at that. Don’t worry, next weekend it’ll be business as usual: we’ll be covering Rebel Moon, Wonka and hopefully some other stuff.) Still, it’s weird to think that there’s an entire month of the release calendar that functionally does not exist when it comes to assessing the year as a whole.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to find time to watch my screeners of Ferrari and The Color Purple before the ballot deadline.