Here is a fun movie marathon infographic from Geek blog Mithril Wisdom’s Movie Marathon Survival Guide.
Add James Bond to the mix and you would double the width of this chart! Bond clocks in at a cool 48.1 hours.
Source: Mithril Wisdom
Category: Movie Marathon Ideas
Suggested movie marathon movies
Cinemablend 24-hour movie marathons
I just discovered Gabe Toro over at Cinemablend has been writing up a whole series of 24-hour movie marathon ideas. Some sound great (Liam Neeson action marathon!) and some are just plain goofy (an entire movie marathon about bears? Really?).
Here they are, from best to goofiest:
- Liam Neeson Action Movie Marathon – Liam Neeson rocks! Exhibit A: Taken. (Warning! This movie marathon contains The Phantom Menace, which critics have determined is hazardous to your mental health).
- Kevin Costner Movie Marathon – Celebrate Kevin Costner’s 30-year career with a movie marathon of his best work!
- Action Sequel Movie Marathon – An entire movie marathon of sequels that actually were better than their predecessors!
- 2013 Non-Oscar Nominee Movie Marathon – The best of the snubbed – good films from 2013 nominated for zero academy awards.
- Car Chase Movie Marathon – Everyone likes car chases right? So why not 24 hours of car chases? I’m sure they definitely won’t blend together into an incomprehensible blur by the time the marathon is done.
- TV Adaption Sequel Movie Marathon – An entire movie marathon of…. sequels of movies adapted from TV….? Whew, I think this list just jumped the shark.
- Vampire Movie Marathon – Take a tour of vampire cinema history…without the original Dracula? For shame vampire movie marathon list!
- Bears Movie Marathon – Lots of movies about Bears. 24 hours worth of movies about bears. They are fuzzy. They are cute. They are deadly. But are they really movie marathon material?
- Terrible Comedy Movie Marathon – Because who wouldn’t want to sit through 24 hours of comedies that utterly fail to make you laugh? Seriously – is there anything worse than a failed comedy? By definition you don’t even get the “its so bad its funny!” treatment.
Comedy Movie Marathon – Where to Start?
Planning a comedy movie marathon is a special type of challenge.
Every human being has slightly different comedic tastes, resulting in the same movie falling flat for some and knee-slappin’ to others. This variety of taste results in a proliferation of sub-genres. Wikipedia lists about 14 sub-genres of comedy films, while this handy infographic claims 35 comedy sub-genres.
By the way, is it funny to anyone else that British humor is its own comedic sub-genre? Here is a bit of an explanation of what sets it apart, but how come you never hear of Canadian humor? Or Polish humor? Oh wait, I suppose there is a certain form of Polish humor out there.
Anyway, I digress. Another challenge is you have to consider your attendees’ health. You wouldn’t want to have your movie marathon added to this Wikipedia page of documented cases of people dying of laughter.
Oops. I digress again. So there are lots of types of comedies out there, and there are many comedies out there widely regarded as “classics”. Where do you start?
In my opinion, variety is the spice of every movie marathon. If you scheduled a movie marathon consisting of the entire Three Stooges Filmography, I think you would start using Moe‘s signature eye-poke on yourself about halfway through.
So, what I did is take some of the comedy sub-genres out there, and picked a good representative of that sub-genre. 13 sub-genres / movies later, and you have yourself a comedy movie marathon! I also listed a link to further explanation of the comedy sub-genre, in case you’d like delve deeper into the depths of humor in a particular area.
Your mileage may vary. If you successfully pull off this comedy movie marathon schedule or another one of your own devising, I’d love to hear about it!
Comedy Movie Marathon Movies
Tootsie
Category: Dramedy
My take: Dustin Hoffman’s character dresses in drag to gain acting success on a soap opera. This comedy is remembered because it is a movie that is running on all cylinders. It is serious, funny, satiric, its characters change, and has great music. In other words, it all comes together for a great final result.
My Cousin Vinny
Category: Fish out of water
My take: One of my favorite comedies. It exemplifies the fish-out-of-water scenario (New Yorker transplanted to the Deep South) but also has characters and a plot that you can care about (kids falsely accused of murder).
Airplane!
Category: Parody
My take: The comedy that launched a thousand imitators. Take a premise from serious 1970s disaster movies, plant serious actors of the day (Peter Graves, Leslie Nielson) acting very seriously, and then jam every scene with pure ridiculousness. Required viewing for all serious comedy enthusiasts.
Animal House
Category: Gross out
My take: The template for all subsequent teen / high-school / college comedies. Raunchy, gross, funny. Authority figure villian. Slacker protagonists. The first movie writing credit of Harold Ramis, and part of the class National Lampoon comedy of the day.
Some Like it Hot
Category: Classic
My take: This is a fantastic classic comedy with impossible-to-replicate elements. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon cross-dressing undercover in a girl band which features ukulele-player Marilyn Monroe.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Category: British humor
My take: The king (ha!) of silly humor, and the most quotable movie by high school boys and other nerds in the last century. Follow King Arthur as he seeks the grail (spoiler alert: he fails in his quest to due the movie running out of money) and faces enemies like a killer rabbit and european vs. african swallow trivia.
When Harry Met Sally
Category: Romantic comedy
My take: Romantic comedies are a much-maligned category of comedy. They’ve been all but dormant in recent years, after having a boom around the 1990s. Why not try out one of the first, and best?
Dr. Strangelove
Category: Black comedy
My take: This movie is a strange, singular experience – but what else would you expect out of Stanley Kubrik? A “comedy” depicting World War III could be started by a single unhinged individual in power. Laugh-out-loud funny? Maybe not so much. Darkly absurd? Yes.
Duck Soup
Category: Slapstick
My take: The best Marx Brothers film, featuring slapstick, puns, political satire, jokes, and classic vaudeville-style performances. It is a comedy time capsule.
This is Spinal Tap
Category: Mockumentary
My take: The fake documentary that takes a hard look at the world of Rock and Roll, and reveals what an absurd mess it can be. More dry, quotable humor than laugh-out-loud funny.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Category: Sophisticated Comedy
My take: A character-driven, witty comedy, featuring Audrey Hepburn playing a manic-pixie dream girl before that term became a thing. I do appreciate classic cinema’s ability to produce comedy, drama, and emotion just from the dialog of a few individuals.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Category: Teen Comedy
My Take: High-school comedy from the early 1980s, which many laud for capturing the reality of teenage life at the time.
Bringing Up Baby
Category: Screwball comedy
My take: Goofy, frenetic, and funny. Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant go from one implausible situation to another, mostly driven by Katherine’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl-ness. I guess she beat Audrey Hepburn to that trope.
Comedy Movie Marathon Schedule
| Start Time | Title |
| 12:00 PM | Tootsie |
| 02:30 PM | My Cousin Vinny |
| 04:45 PM | Airplane! |
| 06:15 PM | Animal House |
| 08:30 PM | Some Like it Hot |
| 10:45 PM | Monty Python and the Holy Grail |
| 12:30 AM | When Harry Met Sally |
| 02:15 AM | Dr. Strangelove |
| 04:00 AM | Duck Soup |
| 05:15 AM | This is Spinal Tap |
| 06:45 AM | Breakfast at Tiffany’s |
| 08:45 AM | Fast Times at Ridgemont High |
| 10:30 AM | Bringing Up Baby |
| 12:12 PM | Finish |
Best Picture Oscar Movie Marathon Checklist
Unless you are looking to break the current movie marathon Guinness world record, I don’t think a single mega-oscar movie marathon is feasible for us mere mortals. So what do we do? The first question to ask is: “Do I want to watch all of the ‘Best Picture’ films, or just the best ones?”
It’s a pertinent question. I compared the list of best picture winners with the American Film Institute’s top 100 American films, and came up with a grand total of 27 films that appeared on both lists. That means that less than 33% of Oscar best picture winners are on the list of the top 100 best American films ever made. Combine that fact with a few opinions on the internet that not all Oscar films have aged that well, and you’d be right to conclude that maybe some of the “best picture” films are better than others.
However, even if you choose to go after only the 27 best films, that’s still about three straight days of movie watching. That is still too much for a single Oscar movie marathon. I think a different approach is needed with the Oscar winners. What about slipping them one-by-one into other movie marathons until you’ve seen them all?
In other words, I think your best bet is to treat the Oscar “best pictures” as more of a bucket list than a movie marathon schedule. At least, that’s what I think I’m going to do. I have seen 21 of these films – less than 25%. I have heard of a lot of these films, but I just haven’t gotten around to seeing most of them yet. I’m going to find them homes in my future movie marathons!
That these films don’t all appear on the critics’ lists doesn’t bother me so much. Living on a diet of only critics’ choices can lead to a severe case of pretentiousness. I like the idea of seeing what America thought was important, or inspiring, or moving, for a particular year in history. It is like watching the video diary for America, one year at a time. I think it’ll be fun!
So, here is the complete list of best picture Oscar winners, along with their length and whether they made it into the AFI top 100. Let’s start checking them off!
Your Oscar Movie Marathon Checklist
* Ok – technically The Fellowship of the Ring is what made the AFI list – but c’mon! They’re all the same movie!
Horror Movie Marathon – Where to start?
Nothing inspires movie marathons quite like the horror genre. Seriously, the movie marathon landscape is littered with them! (for example, see the Ohio 24-hour horror movie marathon, Brookline horror, etc.)
Why is that? There are lots of psychological theories on why we like to watch horror films. Most of them sound like utter malarkey. I like the theory that we enjoy the jolt of adrenaline experienced in a safe environment.
Regardless of the reason, if you want to have a horror movie marathon, you have a lot of material to choose from. Horror movies are cheap, and there are a lot of them. IMDB lists 53,915 entries in the “horror” category (this includes both film and TV) and there are almost 25 horror subgenres out there according to this authoritative-looking infographic. So where do you start?
How about viewing the entire history of horror films in one day? By that, I mean watching the most ground-breaking, influential horror films ever made. The movies that spawned a thousand imitators. At least it gives you a good, horrible foundation of classics to start with. I have a sample schedule for you below. Enjoy 24 hours of sheer terror!
Horror Movie Marathon Movies
Nosferatu
My take: The very first monster movie as we think of them today. This silent movie relies on creepy, dreamlike visuals instead of LOUD NOISE! scares.
Frankenstein
My take: The first and one of the best classic Universal studios monster movies. Features heady subjects for the 1930s – like mad scientists, grave robbing, reanimation of life, child killing, etc.
Godzilla
My take: One of the first and best of the 1950’s “giant monster” / “nuclear threat” movies.
Psycho
My take: The horror movie that deconstructed horror movies by being so violent, sexual, and shocking that it smashed all audience expectations.
Night of the Living Dead
My take: The movie that invented zombies as we know them today, plus a gleeful abandonment of good taste and some social satire to boot.
The Exorcist
My take: So scary and controversial, it caused moviegoers to faint and ruined Linda Blair’s career for no logical reason.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
My take: A template for slasher movies to come, shot in realistic-looking documentary style.
Jaws
My take: The movie that defined the “summer blockbuster”.
Halloween
My take: The wildly successful independent film that set off the 1980s trend of “mindless killer slasher” films.
Alien
My take: A perfect mixture of science fiction and realistic horror.
The Shining
My take: The horror movie like no other horror movie. So out there, it was nominated for two Razzie awards, but now is considered one of the best horror films ever.
The Evil Dead
My take: One of the first independent horror films on VHS, and the inspiration of many famous directors today.
The Blair Witch Project
My take: The horror film that started the”found footage” and “shakey cam” style.
Horror Movie Marathon Schedule
| Start Time | Title |
| 12:00 PM | Nosferatu |
| 01:45 PM | Frankenstein |
| 03:00 PM | Godzilla |
| 04:45 PM | Psycho |
| 07:00 PM | Night of the Living Dead |
| 08:45 PM | The Exorcist |
| 11:00 PM | Texas Chainsaw Massacre |
| 12:30 AM | Jaws |
| 02:45 AM | Halloween |
| 04:20 AM | Alien |
| 06:30 AM | The Shining |
| 09:00 AM | The Evil Dead |
| 10:30 AM | The Blair Witch Project |
