So I’ve had the discussion at least once for every friend I’ve ever had for the last decade. When they come to realization as to how deep my love for films are they tend to eventually ask me, “How many movies have you seen?” The truth is I barely know how to answer that question. It gets even weirder when they discover I collect them, blu rays and DVDs, and discover how many I own – which is hardly enough to challenge some other online film geek’s collections just yet, but still a lot for an average person.

Though recently I’ve been pondering the idea of how many movies one can watch and still be intelligible?

The starting point for the idea of watching multiple films in one sitting has to be the cinematic double feature. Historically these were created, and made popular, towards the end of the silent era of filmmaking. Studios would produce these much smaller (i.e. cheaper) features, ‘B movies’, which would play before the bigger (real) feature film. This allowed for the audience to get a bigger ‘bang’ for their buck and profit the theatres and studios even futher.

This idea evolved over the years and we’ve reached the stage where events such as the AMC Harry Potter Marathon, leading up to the finale film, and even the yearly event Butt-Numb-A-Thon, an event where Harry Knowles plays a 24-hour long selection of films in Austin Texas since 1999. Now I’m not saying these events aren’t fun or even appealing to an individual such as myself, who’s only option is to recreate them in my living room, but rather: are they beneficial to the films being watched?

In the last couple (maybe more) of weeks I’ve been attempting to revisit the entire Bond cannon, before eventually heading off to see Skyfall this weekend. In the last week I’ve seen maybe ten films starring James Bond and I honestly have gotten to a point where it takes me more than a few minutes to try and recite plot points without mixing up each Roger Moore picture as I go along. I’m sure if I started to describe The Spy Who Loved Me by the time I’ve gone three steps in I’m going to talking about For Your Eyes Only.

The other side of that coin is that when I was at TIFF I made my record high of seeing 35 films in 10 days, with my heaviest day being five films. However, I don’t think I ever left a day being confused as to which movie did what. I do admit that it’s obvious that TIFF’s offerings were all different films, with different stars, genres and musical scores. Regardless, I don’t believe the question isn’t a relevant one for the audience of today who has all the media they could ever want at their fingertips.

For the cost of $8/month you are able to be  hooked into the full blown Netflix Instant library of films that are seemingly endless. I never seem to have a queue under the count of 200 and remain unsure of where to begin on any given day — which explains my recent habit of going to twitter with my #NetflixRoutlette requests.

The important question to ask is if this is a good habit and how it impacts not only the viewer psychologically but also how it impacts his ability to perceive the films when that person is randomly pressing play less than five minutes after the ending shot of the previous film (sometimes not even allowing for the credits to roll).

When do films become more than just background noise? How many films have you watched in a day and walked away feeling you absorbed them all without problem?