Data story · Catchphrases
Owen Wilson’s “wow”, movie by movie.
Place each of Owen Wilson’s wows in the five minutes of the film where it happens and most of every movie turns out to be silence. The wows arrive in ones and twos, and once, in Cars 3, five at a time.
Every strip on this page is a real Catchphrases strip from the Huezle app, drawn by the app’s own code. More about Catchphrases.
How to read the strips
Each strip is one movie, from the opening on the left to the credits on the right. Each band is five minutes of running time, so a longer film has more bands. A cream band is five minutes with no wow, amber is a single wow, and deep burnt orange is two or more.
The counts come from the Owen Wilson Wow API, a fan-compiled, MIT-licensed catalogue of his wows with a timestamp for each. Only movies where it lists at least two are included, which leaves twenty films from 1996 to 2017 and eighty-two wows.
Mostly silence
Across the twenty films there are 433 five-minute windows, and 367 of them, about 85%, have no wow at all. Of the rest, 53 hold one wow, 12 hold two, and exactly one window holds more. That silence is what makes the strips recognisable: a film is identified less by how many wows it has than by where the few lit bands fall.
Five in five minutes: Cars 3
Cars 3 ties for the most wows, ten, and packs half of them into a single window, between minutes 25 and 30. No other five minutes in any of the twenty films holds more than two.
- No wows
- A wow
- Wow after wow
The same count, spread thin: Midnight in Paris
The other film with ten could hardly look less alike. Midnight in Paris spreads its wows across seven different windows, from the first ten minutes to the last stretch before the credits, and three of those windows hold two.
- No wows
- A wow
- Wow after wow
One band in a field of cream
At the quiet end, Meet the Parents has two wows and both land in the same window, between minutes 55 and 60. The whole film reads as a single dark band near the middle.
- No wows
- A wow
- Wow after wow
Wedding Crashers is the opposite pattern: six wows, never two in the same window, from the opening five minutes to just before the two-hour mark. It is one of the longest strips in the set and one of the most evenly spaced.
- No wows
- A wow
- Wow after wow
What the strips cannot tell you. A band counts wows in a five-minute window, not how they are said. A long, drawn-out wow and a quick one under the breath count the same, and a film missing from the catalogue is missing here too.
The other sixteen films are puzzles in the Catchphrases category. The same category counts a word companies cannot stop saying: mentions of AI in annual reports. For more film data drawn the same way, see how great directors’ careers rise and fall.
In Huezle you get one of these strips and four movie titles. See if you can place a film by where its few wows fall.
Download on the App StoreFree on iPhoneQuestions
How many times does Owen Wilson say wow?
This set counts 82 wows across 20 movies, using the fan-compiled Owen Wilson Wow catalogue. Movies where it lists only one wow are left out, so his career total is higher.
Which movie has the most Owen Wilson wows?
Cars 3 and Midnight in Paris tie with ten each. Cars 3 has five of them inside a single five-minute stretch, between minutes 25 and 30.
How many times does Owen Wilson say wow in Wedding Crashers?
Six, spread across the film from the opening minutes to near the two-hour mark, never more than one in any five-minute window.
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Now try naming one yourself.
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