A correspondent writes to say he has been hearing watch used with reference to new movies in the cinema, as in Have you watched The Artist? and I watched The Artist last week. He would use see in such a context and wonders what I think. For him, Have you watched The Artist could only mean 'Have you seen it on TV or on a DVD?'

The verb watch has always had a note of alertness in it, from its earliest uses in Old English meaning 'keep awake' or 'keep vigil': it is 'seeing + attention'. In its transitive uses, there's typically some notion of surveillance or vigilance, either physical or mental. A passive sense of 'seeing' isn't mentioned in the OED, but it's certainly there with such collocations as watch television and watch a DVD, where 'alertness' has broadened into some notion of 'closeness'. My correspondent uses as another example the contrast between I watched the birds at my bird feeder (where he observed them closely) and I saw the birds at my bird feeder (which suggests that he has stopped watching or that they are no longer there).

But the collocation watch + movies is a powerful one, hugely reinforced by sites which ask us to watch movies online (32 million hits for this phrase in Google). And it's a very short step from I'm going to watch something on TV to I'm going to watch something at the cinema. So I'm not surprised to see this usage gaining ground. There are hundreds of online examples like these:

Last night my wife and I watched The Artist....
I watched The Artist about a month ago...
I'm going to watch The Artist tonight...

It's not my usage - yet. I still say see, like my correspondent. But I think it's only a matter of time...