How To Pick a Movie the Whole Group Will Enjoy

I live in the Middle East. The theater in our neighborhood (now that we live in a city with a theater) has two screens. It shows mainly bollywood and horror flicks. If you don’t want to go to a movie you can go out to a restaurant, have a picnic on the beach or in the desert or….

Nope. That’s about it.

So it’s pretty often that we find ourselves with a group of friends trying to select a movie to watch. But there are always issues in selecting movies with a group.

First, it takes forever to decide. Usually the group will just vote, but vote on what? All the DVDs in your collection? All the new releases on iTunes? Deciding which movies to include in the vote is its own round of decisions.

Then you vote and, while the winning majority are totally stoked, a few of the minority might be really bummed. And bummed leads to iphone browsing, chit-chat and other things that make the majority either frustrated that you’re distracting them or feeling bad because they know you didn’t want to watch that movie in the first place.

Am I the only one who has suffered choruses of “Are you sure? Are you sure you’re sure? We can watch something else…”?

But there’s an easy solution. We’ve been using this around our house for a while now and it has yielded good results every time. I even used it on a set of siblings recently and it worked like a charm.

Here’s the format:

First, let each member of the group select a few movies for the “pot”. These are the movies you’ll eventually be selecting from. We usually have people select between four and six, depending on how large the group is.

Next, go around the group and let each person “veto” a movie. Keep going around until there is one film left and, voila!, there’s your pick.

That’s it!

Of course, be flexible with it. Make it work for your own family and friends. We change it up a bit to suit different scenarios. In the case with the kids, we had one sibling choose three movies and let the other sibling choose between the three. Change it up to suit your needs. And let me know how it goes!

How do you pick movies in a group? Are you always the victor? The disappointed? Do you think you’ll try out a version of the “veto” method?