Last Ten Years Of Cinema

In the last blog post, I talked about how I built a Content-Based Recommender System that could make movie recommendations catering to my taste. The data was collected from IMDb and contained information about 48000 movies. While working on that project, I took a journey to the cinema landscape that existed between 2009-2018 and stumbled upon some interesting movie facts. If you are curious about them, join me in this adventure.

With the increase in number of moviegoers and the expansion of the entertainment industry, the number of movies released has increased by 60% in the last 10 years and the trend shows a nearly consistent increase every year. That’s a cool thing for movie buffs; the movie industry will keep them entertained with increasing number of choices.

I am sure if you are into movies and a bit philosophical, you must have wondered that some words are very popular in the movie titles. If you are thinking about the one word that makes the world go round, then you are absolutely right. ‘Love’ — an intrinsic and unavoidable theme across cultures and age, has captivated movie-makers and audience alike:) It is followed by ‘Movie’, ‘Night’, ‘Dead’, ‘Life’ and ‘Man’. ‘Movie’!!! Duhhh!!! There are over 500 such movies with titles such as ‘Slapped! The movie’, ‘The Best Movie Ever 4ever’ and not to forget ‘Scary Movie’.

Moving from the movie title to genre, while ‘Love’ seems to be a much loved word in movie titles, Drama is the leading genre followed by Comedy, Horror, Thriller, Action and Romance.

Let’s check which movies made big bucks. The 5 biggest grossers of last 10 years is ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’, ‘Avatar’, ‘Black Panther’, ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ and ‘Jurassic World’.

Next comes the category of highly voted movies in last 10 years. (It feels as if I am hosting an award show ;) In this category Christopher Nolan’s Inception beats them all. It is followed by ‘Out of Order’, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Django Unchained’.

We usually watch and enjoy movies that are around 2 hours long. But there are some movies that are crazy long and are made only for exhibit purposes. The longest among them is 91 hour long and titled ‘London EC1’. This is followed by ‘Deregulation’ and ‘Aberration’ –both titles are triggering my biologist brain!

Although, the vast majority of the movies are directed by single directors, there are some which are directed by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10…even up to 81 directors. Yes! It took 81 directors to make ‘World of Death’.

Finally, I was interested in making a predictive model for financial success of the movie. Using the available data, it seems that number of votes garnered by a movie correlates well with the revenue generated, to a large extent. This is followed by rating and metascore of a movie. Yes, these three are very obvious criteria but it is harder to tell which among the three is most important. An interesting fact here is that if the movie belongs to genre ‘Adventure’ then it is more likely to be a grosser than the other genre.

If you are interested to know more about this analysis or to get its source code, visit Github.