Who doesn’t love holidays? From popular events celebrated across cultures to irreverent occasions invented by people on the internet, they bring us together in celebration and remembrance—even when we can’t be together in person.

It was the mention of just such a meme holiday, based on a date in the 2004 film Mean Girls, that sparked my interest in film calendar lists, a hobby that’s become half research project, half obsession—and one in which you can now participate, via this first of twelve Letterboxd lists to be published throughout 2022.

The scene in Mean Girls is now internet-iconic, memorialized in hundreds of GIFs. In it, high-school student Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) describes interacting with her crush Aaron (Jonathan Bennett), who sits in front of her in math class. “On October 3rd, he asked me what day it was,” she narrates. We see the scene play out: “It’s October 3rd,” she tells Aaron with a smile.

It’s the most mundane conversation possible, which accounts for its light-hearted embrace by internet denizens, who have dubbed October 3 “Mean Girls Day” —⁠a day to wear pink and post memorable quotes from the film.

October also features another beloved DIY holiday, created by fans of Back to the Future Part II. In the movie, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) hop into a time machine and travel to the(ir) future, arriving on October 21, 2015 in Hill Valley, California, a futuristic city packed with holograms and hoverboards. Thus, October 21 is forevermore known to people online as “Back to the Future Day”. In our non-fictional 2015, it was even officially marked by the White House with a day of innovative conversations about imagining futures together.

When I saw people celebrating these dates on social media, something about it tickled my nerd brain. ‘What other movies and television shows have dates in them?’ I wondered. ‘Surely there must be enough to make a full year’s calendar, so that fellow geeks could watch these movies in order?’

I discovered the book A Year of Movies: 365 Films to Watch on the Date They Happened, in which detail-obsessed author Ivan Walters documents a year of real and fictional movie events, from that terrible April day when Rose lost Jack (and world shipping lost the Titanic), to the specific Saturday in March that The Breakfast Club showed up for detention.

Walters’ book set me on the long path of film calendaring; I wanted to see what other dates more research would produce. Several years and many spreadsheets later, I’m happy to report that the answer is: yes, it is possible to make that calendar, and then some.

It’s also interesting to see what calendar dates our movie-making culture values (again, see the glut of films set at the end of December), and which ones take on new significance with the passing of time. I’m especially fond of movies set in the then-far future that we’ve now caught up to, like Blade Runner, released in 1982 and set in the year 2019.

An event from Blade Runner—Roy Batty’s incept date—is the entry for January 8, and the other dates for this month can be found in the January list, the first of twelve monthly lists to be published this year, along with several more detailed (read: even nerdier) lists for specific cinematic seasons. They’re designed to be living lists, because although I have been feverishly keeping track of movie dates for a few years now, I know there will be many I’ve missed. The list comments are wide open for your contributions!

Happy 2022, and may this be your best movie-watching year yet.