It’s super annoying that iTunes limits you to categorizing your videos into a single genre only. Practically every movie made fits into more than one genre. Thankfully we don’t have to suffer from these shortsighted limitations anymore, and if you missed my post on enabling multiple genres for videos on Apple TV (and iTunes), you should check it out.

Here are just a few example of movies that I think are hard to pin down into just one genre:

Braveheart – Action, Biography, Drama, War & Conflict
Aliens – Action, Adventure, Horror, Thriller
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Action, Adventure, Fantasy
Star Wars, Episode V (The Empire Strikes Back) – Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

Before I figured out a workaround to put movies into multiple genres, I was struggling to categorize them in single genres. I was debating with my friend Chris over which genre fit certain movies, and that prompted me to make a movie genre naming flowchart to help narrow down difficult movies into a single genre. This proved to be a fun exercise, although one in futility. So I abandoned the effort in favor of sense and reason.

An exercise in futility: Categorizing movies into a single genre.

Chris decided to make a spreadsheet that instead lists every possible genre that each video in our respective iTunes Libraries would fit into, and we Dropboxed the file so we could work on it together.

The resulting list of genres is as follows:

NOTES ABOUT THE GENRES:

• Music Video – used for live concert recordings, not the typical “music videos”
• Raunchy – Hancock (Extended and Unrated), Knocked Up, Me Myself and Irene, Old School (Unrated), Semi-Pro, Step Brothers (Extended and Unrated), The Hangover, etc.
• Slasher – Hannibal Rising, Event Horizon, Hostel, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds

What genres have you come up with that aren’t in this list? I’d love to hear from you.