Introducing The Great Catch-Up Over at Nathan Rabin's Happy Place!
This is gonna be great!
Introducing the Great Catch Up
Over the course of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s six and a half year existence I have tried just about everything to make it more popular and lucrative without success. It’s not uncommon for me to introduce an idea or a feature for the Happy Place that I couldn’t be more excited about that actually makes the site less popular and less lucrative.
I’ve tried just about everything expect for the most obvious thing. So I have decided, at this late stage, to write about the biggest, most popular and talked about movies of the past half decade or so.
To that end I am introducing a new feature called The Great Catch Up. With the Great Catch Up I will be going back and watching the many, many, many incredibly important new movies that I have not seen since this site began in 2017.
And YOU will get to choose which movies I see! Every week there will be a poll for paid subscribers here and for people who pledge the Patreon page for Nathan Rabin's Happy Place to determine which of two conceptually linked movies I should watch and write about.
It’s a bit of a throwback to two old Happy Place columns where I’d let readers choose which movie Clint Worthington and myself would have to see and discuss for a feature called Control Nathan and Clint on our old podcast Nathan Rabin’s Happy Cast and a feature called Lukewarm Takes where I watched important movies I missed during their theatrical runs because I stopped being a film critic in the traditional sense in 2015.
It’s also analogous to a feature here at Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas where paid subscribers choose which new movie I see in the theaters and write about each week. That has been both fun and interactive and the nice thing about The Great Catch Up is that it gives paid subscribers to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas twice as much power in that you get to vote in two polls every week to determine the weekly content of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place and Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas.
Also, I want to encourage people to pledge my Patreon, where I’ve been posting between five and seven entries from The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book on movies about the film industry, every week and I want to give readers a reason to pledge to my Patreon beyond the never-ending stream of high-quality content from The Fractured Mirror.
I’ve been putting together a list of big movies from the past six and half years that I haven’t seen and am very, very excited about the long but satisfying journey ahead of me.
Here are the first batch of movies that will be contenders for The Great Catch Up polls:
1. . Beauty and the Beast
2. The Bye Bye Man
3. John Wick Chapter 2
4. The Great Wall
5. Fist Fight
6. Rock Dog
7. Power Rangers
8. Ghost in the Shell
9. The Boss Baby
10. Smurfs: The Lost Village
11. Going in Style
12. Colossal
13. Snatched
14. Alien: Covenant
15. Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
16. Wonder Woman
17. The Mummy
18. All Eyez on Me
19. The Big Sick
20. The House
21 .Spider-Man: Homecoming
22. Dunkirk
23. War for the Planet of the Apes
24. Atomic Blonde
25. Detroit
26. The Dark Tower
27. Annabelle: Creation
28. The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
29. Good Time
30. Only Living Boy in New York
31. The Hitman’s Bodyguard
32. Logan Lucky
33. It
34. 9/11
35. Mother!
36. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
37. Jeepers Creepers 3
38. American Made
39. Flatliners
40. Blade Runner 2049
41. My Little Pony: The Movie
42. Brawl in Cell Block 99
43. Happy Death Day
44. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
45. Geostorm
46. The Snowman
47. Boo 2! A Madea Halloween
48. Leatherface
49. Jigsaw
50. Amityville: The Awakening
51. A Bad Moms Christmas
52. Lady Bird
53. Last Flag Flying
54. Murder on the Orient Express
55. Daddy’s Home 2
56. LBJ
57. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
58. Coco
59. Call Me By Your Name
60. The Shape of Water
61. Wonder Wheel
62. I, Tanya
63. Beyond Skyline
64. Downsizing
65. Pitch Perfect 3
66. All the Money in the World
67. Phantom Thread
Here’s the fun part: that is not a complete list of films that I’ll be writing about. It’s just movies from 2017, which I don’t even recall being a particularly good year for film. The actual list will be six times as long. At least!
I thought about calling this project the Great Catch-Up of 2023 but if I write up one of these movies every week it will take me years to catch up. I could easily spend five years on this one feature alone.
I want this Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place to be a more satisfying experiences for readers so I need your help. Please do consider pledging my Patreon page or becoming a paid subscriber here.
I would love to pass thousand free subscriber mark today (we’re only 18 away) and have a whole bunch of new Patreon patrons/paid subscribers here.
So what should it be? Rock Dog or The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature? 9/11 or The Only Living Boy in New York? Jigsaw or Leatherface? The Boss Baby or Smurfs: The Lost Village? Wonder Woman or Spider-Man: Homecoming? Blade Runner 2049 or Alien: Covenant? The Bye-Bye Man or The Snowman? Mr. Reader, you could have saved my website/career. I gave you all the clues.
This is going to be a long, enjoyable ride. I hope you will at least consider riding shotgun alongside me through this crazy trip. We’ve got plenty of room!
Help determine the future of the site by pledging my Substack at
or pledging my Patreon at
I actually recall some of those movies being pretty good. You’re in for some fun rides, at least.
For the record, Brawl in Cellblock 69 is a great film (and no joke, I believe that True Detective season 2 is far superior to season 1. And that is not an opinion I hold just to get into arguments, it is just an opinion that can be fun to discuss... but not one of my friends who disagree finished watching season 2, so an honest discussion of different opinions I have not had) thank you for listening to my nothing burger of a comment.