On Movies: A Brief Statistical Overview of My Blu-ray Collection

Hi there. It is early afternoon here in New Hometown, Florida on Sunday, August 29, 2021. Currently, the temperature is 90˚F under mostly cloudy skies. With humidity at 58% and the wind blowing from the southeast at 7 MPH, the feels-like temperature is 103˚F. Today’s forecast: We can expect scattered rain showers and a high of 91˚F. Tonight, scattered rain showers will linger in the area. The low will be 76˚F. The Air Quality Index (AQI) is 42 or Good.

One of the cool things about having an account on the Blu-ray.com site is that you can create an inventory – or catalog, or database if you prefer – of your home media collection. All you need to do is register – it’s free – then search for Blu-rays or DVDs that you have bought or received as gifts for your video library. With rare exceptions, most of the titles released by legitimate businesses will be in the catalog. On Blu-ray.com, you’ll find home media releases from many countries all over the world, so the site is not necessarily U.S.-centric.[1]

Another cool thing about creating a Collection on Blu-ray.com is this: If you add a disc into your list of Blu-rays or DVDs, the site automatically creates a statistics page that lets you know:

• How many movies and/or TV shows you own on each format
• How many stock keeping units (SKUs) you own
• Precise breakdowns of your collection by genre, release year, MPAA rating, production studios, and retailers
• Packaging (DigiBooks, Steelbooks)

For instance, as of this writing, this is what my Blu-ray collection – which includes the smaller subset of 4K UHD Blu-rays – looks like:

COLLECTION STATISTICS

• Movies: 415 (58 TV)
• SKUs: 272
• SteelBooks: 10
• DigiBooks: 4
• Region coding: Region free: 174, Region A: 228 (locked 34), Region B: 4 (locked 0), Region C: 0 (locked 0), Unverified: 40
• Average runtime: 211 minutes
• Total runtime: 60 days, 21 hours, 20 minutes

The Statistics page also features colorful pie charts that go along with the various breakdowns of a collection. Every time you update your database by adding a new title – I usually do that when I order a new Blu-ray or DVD – the site automatically adjusts the statistics in each chart,

For instance, when I recently added writer-director Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat, a steamy noirish drama-thriller inspired by Double Indemnity, the statistics show that Thrillers make up 6.7% of my overall Blu-ray collection, that Warner Bros. is the studio with the largest piece of the pie (22.4%), and that Amazon is the retailer I buy most of my movies from (93.8%)

The Statistics page also lets you know which genres tend to dominate your collection, and which ones are underrepresented. Here’s how my Blu-ray collection stacks up, genre-wise:

Relative genre distribution

Strongly overrepresented: Epic, History, Melodrama, War Overrepresented: Adventure, Film-Noir, Period, Sci-Fi, Western Underrepresented: Comedy, Dark humor, Horror Strongly underrepresented: Anime, Foreign, Martial arts, Music, Nature, Other, Psychological thriller, Sport, Surreal

This distribution of genres should not surprise anyone. I am, of course, a guy in his late fifties who grew up watching mostly action adventures, war films, gangster films, and Westerns. I obviously like other genres, but action-packed movies are my favorites.

Interestingly, even though Blu-ray.com says that War is one of the Strongly overrepresented genres, that category makes up only 3.3% of my overall collection. I find that drily amusing, especially since one of the misconceptions my half-sister has about me is that I only watch war movies.

I should try to add more comedies to my collection. I don’t want to be remembered as The War Movie Guy. The problem is that I am notoriously picky about comedies, and I find it difficult to choose among them. But…yeah. Comedy titles make up just 2.7% of my collection.

Well, Dear Reader, that about wraps it up for this blog post – the 601^st post in A Certain Point of View, Too – so I will part company with you here. It’s Sunday, after all, and I plan to take it easy for the rest of the afternoon. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.

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[1] Of course, since I live in the United States and need to acquire Blu-rays and DVDs that are encoded for Region A/1 or region-free, I stick to the U.S. catalog.