The end of one year and the beginning of another means only one thing for online media: lists. And with the publication of any list comes discourse from its readers about what is, and isn’t, included. This discourse is why the tradition of list publishing will never die. Lists generate clicks, and clicks allow this fragile ecosystem to continue for another year. But there is one end-of-year list that breaks through the list fatigue, one that offers an alternative perspective of summarizing the year in media: Steven Soderbergh’s annual Seen, Read list.
Published on the director’s website, the Soderblog, Soderbergh’s Seen, Read list comes out the first week of each new year. The name is self-explanatory: Soderbergh writes out, day by day, everything he watched and read over the past year. That includes films, TV shows, short films, plays, books, and short stories; some years add all the albums he listened to on vinyl for the first time. Soderbergh also includes the days he starts principal photography on his films and TV shows alongside the media entries. The Seen, Read list does not exist as another piece of content to be swallowed up and spit out by search engines. It is simple, endearing, and decidedly disinterested in clicks. It does not promote any project, attract followers, or generate ad revenue. Though it’s personally published by an A-list director, nothing about how it is presented is engineered to grab someone’s attention, and for that reason, ironically, it stands out. This voluntary offering remains a unique insight into the life of a working filmmaker and, over the years, has become a counterpoint to contemporary film engagement.
It’s not unheard of to get a sense of what artists watch. Every 10 years the film magazine Sight And Sound polls a variety of directors and critics on their picks for the 10 best films of all time. The 2022 version included responses from directors like Guillermo del Toro, Sofia Coppola, and Wes Anderson. Some publish their own lists. Quentin Tarantino debuted his top films of the 21st century on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast because we live in bizarre times. Martin Scorsese’s 2006 list of must-watch foreign films for aspiring directors has been circulating online for years. But these lists are intentionally curated, inviting a specific kind of discourse that objective diary entries do not.
Then there’s the more diary-like Letterboxd. You can find the watching habits of Mike Flanagan, Charli XCX, and Carrie Coon and Tracy Letts posting publicly on the platform (the latter account is by far the best). But Letterboxd is still a social media account, and by that definition it is meant to be engaged with. You cannot comment on the Soderblog; there is no space to like or share Soderbergh’s Seen, Read lists. There aren’t ratings or pithy reviews about the works featured to generate discussion or prove one’s cleverness. What is so special about the Seen, Read list is that it presents an artist’s habits without commentary. Through its publication, it even helps to demystify the film industry itself.
The Seen, Read list dates back to 2009, although Soderbergh only started publishing it on the Soderblog in 2013. At first it was one of many entries published on the Soderblog, which also contains Soderbergh’s general musings about art, filmmaking, and his own career. It harkens back to the blog era of the early 2000s internet, when everyone had their own individual space to present their ideas in their own voice. While non-list entries do spring up—in October 2025, he published a short blog post and two episodes he directed of the 1993 Showtime series Fallen Angels that were previously unavailable online—the blog’s output has been mainly new Seen, Read lists since 2017.
Like the Soderblog itself, the Seen, Read lists are presented without pomp, reflecting Soderbergh’s unique relationship to the internet compared to his peers. Just a few months ago, when reports came out about a cancelled Kylo Ren Star Wars spin-off film he was developing, Soderbergh began posting additional information about the project on a BlueSky account that had previously flown under the radar. It’s hard to think of another Oscar-winning director who engages with social media in the same way. He’s not hiding his identity; his account posted 2025’s Seen, Read list and contains posts about developing a James Bond film with Tony Gilroy. But he’s also not overtly announcing himself under his real name and a verified badge, like Rian Johnson.
There’s an unassuming casualness to Soderbergh’s online presence compared to his industry peers. He’s still Cannes’ youngest Best Director winner, still the filmmaker behind some of the best crowd-pleasers of the 21st century with the Ocean’s Trilogy, still one of the poster children for the indie film boom of the 1990s. He still releases at least one film or TV show every year, and has since 1995. But he’s also someone who, on December 30, 2018, binged 10 episodes of Below Deck. A representative day in Soderbergh’s extensive media logs is April 6, 2020. On that day, the director watched The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant, the 1982 Channel 4 murder-mystery The Draughtsman’s Contract, and an episode of Below Deck Sailing Yacht. He also loves Dateline, 48 Hours Mystery, and Britain’s Most Expensive Homes—the latter of which he spent three days watching in January 2022.
If you pore over several Seen, Read lists you will begin to notice some frequent rewatches. Soderbergh watches Jaws, Sunset Boulevard, and Citizen Kane almost every year. Also common are The Day Of The Jackal, Sexy Beast, The Parallax View, Dr. Strangelove, and The Social Network. In 2010, the year The Social Network came out, Soderbergh watched the film five times—including twice on May 22, a viewing experience he paired with Tommy Wiseau’s The Room.
This year’s edition features more of the usual suspects. Perhaps the best day was January 25, when he watched The Sting, The Empire Strikes Back, The Haunting (1963), and a spot of tennis: the Australian Open Women’s Final. A new feature this year saw the filmmaker include when he finished drafts of upcoming projects, like The Other Hamilton, an HBO Max series announced in 2022 to be produced with Don Cheadle, and a TV adaptation of The Sot-Weed Factor which was first announced in 2013. While many announced works simply never come to pass and fade to the background, Soderbergh shines a light on the unpublicized efforts that go into them.
For every project that comes out, there are dozens if not hundreds of hours put into those that don’t. Just as the Seen, Read list offers a frank look into an A-list director’s work schedule (Soderbergh started principal photography on his 2018 thriller Unsane, which was shot on an iPhone 7 Plus, on June 1, 2017. He watched a cut of the film on June 15.), it also provides proof of his development process.
The director has been writing a book about the making of Jaws, going day-by-day through that film’s production to construct the shooting process, which will in turn serve as a blueprint for how to tackle making such a complicated film. To this end, Soderbergh watched Jaws once and read the biography Steven Spielberg: All The Films in 2023. In 2024 he watched Jaws four times, the documentary The Making Of Jaws, and read the books The Making Of The Movie Jaws, Jaws: The Inside Story, and the original novel. He watched the movie three times in 2025 and read two books and a short article about the film. There is no announced publication date or timeline for Soderbergh’s making-of book. But by reading his lists, we can see how it has taken over his time the past few years, and how he juggles it with his other projects. While these are not descriptive entries, they allow a reader to observe the work being done and the path he’s taking as he tackles a kind of project he’s never done before.
Most of film history has been told through middlemen. Artists are interviewed by journalists or biographers about how their work is made, often long after the fact. Sometimes a director or actor records a commentary track to accompany a DVD release, allowing a more direct way to hear first-person stories. Part of this obfuscation is intentional—the less accessible an artist is, the more that film upholds its dreamy quality. But mostly, it’s the practical result of busy people having finite time to talk about their work.
In 2025, despite every person now having an outlet to speak publicly through social media, the situation is even more commercial. Interviews are set up by publicists, only granted when there is something to promote. Artists are interviewed on podcasts, arranging in advance what they are willing to talk about. When journalists do get a chance to conduct an interview, their time is often brief. The majority of press tours, ranging from the red carpet to junkets, have been taken over by influencers. The result is a film industry where lengthy, open conversation is as rare as ever.
Soderbergh certainly has plenty to promote. In 2025 he had three films come out: Presence in January, Black Bag in March, and The Christophers, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. And yet, the most honest and complete way to understand him is through the actual description of how he spends his days. The Seen, Read list is not just an amusing insight into a successful director’s media consumption, but a look at how a prolific filmmaker balances his watching and working schedules. But there is also a rebellious aspect to how simple the action of its publication is. At a time when the media surrounding the film industry feels more manufactured than ever, the simple presentation and consistency of the list is refreshingly antithetical to how most modern filmmakers present themselves.
Soderbergh wrote a 2023 blog entry for the Soderblog about film critic Pauline Kael. He writes, “I didn’t always agree with her, but that wasn’t the point. The POINT was you had to know what she thought, because she taught you how to look at and think about movies, and placed them in the context of works from other art forms.” While there is no personal writing in the Seen, Read lists, they feel like an extension of what Soderbergh values about Kael. He is putting his own art in context of the art that inspires and entertains him. It may not be critical writing, but it is open and vulnerable enough to serve a similar purpose. From this unvarnished earnestness, one can find a perspective on art, and the context for his own work.
The social media revolution has seen human connection slowly whittled away into branding exercises. People are brands, companies are brands, art is a brand. Brands are curated. Brands only say what benefits them. If you are a Letterboxd influencer, every review you write and star rating you give is built in service to you, the brand under which your ideas fall. This process has transformed the way we engage with entertainment. Our behavior takes on an inherently performative aspect, even when it is genuine. Soderbergh’s Seen, Read list provides an alternative statement: a yearly accounting that simply says “this is my work, and this is the life I maintain to produce that work.” The lists lay bare the humanizing context of pre-production, production, and post-production, hidden between reality TV binge sessions. Every Seen, Read list underscores the person behind art. It is that element, inspiring in its unpretentiousness, that brings hope to every new year—a hope to better engage with art itself, rather than the systems that promote it.
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