How Does Our Taste in Movies Change With Age?

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How Does Our Taste in Movies Change With Age?<br>How aging shapes our movie-watching habits, genre preferences, and relationship with the past.

Daniel Parris<br>Jun 10, 2026

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Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash<br>A quick note: I recently launched the Stat Significant Data Catalog , where you can find downloadable datasets assembled, cleaned, and updated weekly by Stat Significant—including the one used in this analysis. You can explore the catalog here , with full access available to paying subscribers.

Intro: What If We Used to Be Worse?

In her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion makes the case for journaling as a way of staying in touch with our former selves: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” This sounds charming in the abstract. But what if the person you used to be was significantly worse? What if willful ignorance is the wiser choice?<br>What if—God forbid—you once had terrible taste in movies? And what if a document existed chronicling these regrettable selections? Unfortunately for me, such a document exists. A few years ago, I found my middle-school yearbook, which was cute until it wasn’t. Every entry asked its subject to list their favorite things, and there, preserved in permanent ink, were my favorite movies: Scary Movie 3, Not Another Teen Movie, and Shrek 2. Yikes! No Citizen Kane. No Hungarian slow cinema. No Hitchcock. Not even The Godfather, Part I or II. Just spoofs and sequels.<br>In previous articles, I’ve explored how musical taste forms, finding that our favorite songs and styles take shape during adolescence and remain remarkably stable after our twenties. My middle-school movie favorites, by contrast, bear little resemblance to my viewing habits today. Perhaps our taste in film evolves differently than our taste in music. Maybe the radical reinvention of movie-watching preference is a universal phenomenon.<br>So today, we’ll explore how movie taste shifts with age and how nostalgia distorts our sense of filmmaking quality.<br>How Does Our Taste in Movies Change With Age?

MovieLens is an online community that collects movie ratings and uses them to recommend films to its users. In 2004, the project published an anonymized dataset containing more than 1 million user ratings submitted between 1995 and 2003, along with each reviewer’s age and gender. This archive spans several files and requires substantial assembly and cleaning before it can be analyzed, so I did the legwork of turning it into a usable, single-file dataset that paying subscribers can download here.<br>Using this extensive record of moviegoing preferences, we can examine how our tastes and viewing habits evolve with age.<br>As a new parent, my mind immediately went to movie-viewing volume. With a four-month-old, I am not exactly plugged into movie culture—or really any culture unrelated to said four-month-old. So I wanted to know whether this “parent tax” is universal: Do we watch fewer films as our responsibilities grow?<br>The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes. In the MovieLens dataset, average rating volume peaks among users ages 25 to 34, then declines with each passing decade.

But this metric captures all forms of movie watching: DVDs, cable television, and trips to the theater. When we isolate contemporary releases—films likely to have been seen in theaters—a different pattern emerges. Instead of peaking in early adulthood, theatrical moviegoing is highest in our teenage years and early twenties, then declines steadily thereafter.

A friend recently asked me whether the dueling box office success of Obsession and Backrooms was “bringing younger audiences back to theaters.” This question was likely inspired by some New Yorker trend piece that chronicles a sweeping cultural shift roughly two weeks before that trend is obsolete.<br>My hot take is that younger viewers have always made up a large share of theatrical audience. Whenever a movie becomes a surprise hit, people scrutinize its turnout, discover that young people were in the theater, and briefly treat their presence as a revelation.<br>At the same time, Obsession and Backrooms are both horror films, which brings us to the intersection of genre preference and age. You are more likely to find younger audiences at a scary movie inspired by a 4chan internet meme (Backrooms) than at a dad-core drama about a meteorologist trying to predict the weather on D-Day—which is the actual premise of a movie currently in theaters called Pressure. If you’ve seen Band of Brothers multiple times, own several Jack Ryan novels, and think Apple’s weather app is lacking in detail, then this movie’s for you.<br>Indeed, our MovieLens data reveals a clear generational divide across several genres: younger audiences tend to favor horror, comedy, animation, and action, while older viewers gravitate toward dramas, war films,...