Fun with IMDB data!

Watching movies and keeping track of what you've already seen and what you are planning to see can be quite an overwhelming task. Luckily there is IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, made by geeks for geeks. It's the website I probably frequent the most, whether it's to look up information on a specific film, to just randomly browse through trivia for fun or to get enraged by user comments. Although I've been a user of the site for almost a decade now I didn't know that I can download information about my rating history including all the main information about the films. So I checked out the data a little bit more in detail in Excel and made the following useless observations:

So far I've rated a total of 1,424 movies proving that it's time for me to find a new hobby. The oldest movie in the list is Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans by F.W. Murnau from 1927 while the newest movie is currently Captain Phillips by Paul Greengrass from 2013, based on release date. Alphabetically the first movie in the list is Greg Marcks' 11:14 from 2003 and the last movie is Zombieland by Ruben Fleischer from 2009.

Of the 1,424 films exactly 1,397 are listed as feature films, 26 as documentaries and exactly 1 as a TV movie. The single TV movie is actually Steven Spielberg's Duel from 1971, his first credit as a feature-length film director. Only hardcore film fans have heard about Spielberg, many consider him a forgotten relic of an ancient past, but if you care to know, he went on to direct little-seen independent dramas such as Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and the very obscure Jurassic Park.

Looking at the the years the films were made, I made a not so surprising observation:

I watched more movies made between 2000 and 2009 than from all the previous decades COMBINED. So yes, I guess I am mostly watching recent stuff. 2004 is the top year in terms of quantity, reaching a staggering 85 films.

When it comes to runtime we have Tod Browning's 1932 horror masterpiece Freaks at one end of the spectrum with only 64 minutes while the other end is dominated by Kenneth Branagh's monumental 1996 Hamlet adaptation that clocks in at 242 minutes.

IMDB lists movies as possibly belonging to multiple genres, i.e. a film like Saw is listed as crime, horror and mystery. Based on that let's see how the genres are distributed over the list of my rated films.

The top genres are unsurprisingly drama and comedy with 46.63% and 40.17% respectively although I personally would have expected to see comedy on top. Almost every third film I rated has thriller elements and every fourth film is action oriented. Some genres I definitely need to stack up on are film noir and documentary, which are at the tail end of the diagram. Bring it on, Errol Morris and Otto Preminger!

Let's have a look at ratings. The films have an average IMDB user rating of 6.952 with a median of 7.1 and a standard deviation of 0.977. My personal ratings have an average of 6.178 with a median of 6 and a standard deviation of 1.672. Comparing the medians doesn't make much sense as the IMDB user rating is always down to a tenth whereas my ratings are always integers. The average however works a little bit better: As you can see there's an overlap when you compare the means and take the standard deviations into account but I'm still a little bit more critical than the IMDB user community, but that probably doesn't mean much.

Talking about quantity of movies by director there's another no brainer at the top of the list: Steven Spielberg dominates with 22 movies, then we have Ridley Scott and David Cronenberg in second place with 10 films each, and these guys are followed in third place by Tim Burton, Richard Donner, Robert Zemeckis and Martin Scorsese with 9 films each.

So what's the ultimate takeaway from that little look at more or less pointless data? Other than that I am devoted to rate almost every movie I see and that I probably should watch a couple more classics and not too much modern rubbish, there's really nothing insightful. But hey, you made it to the end of the blog post so I present to you a collection of cat and dog gifs. Hooray for the Internet!