Chapter 2 Data sources

Our main data source is obtained from https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/, a daily updated movie dataset collected by IMDB. They made these subsets of IMDb data available for access to customers for personal and non-commercial use, but didn’t reveal the way they collected.

Compared to other options like TMDB Database API, the one in IMDB can be directly download, up-to-date, and follows standard database format with id to each person, movie, and even episode.

This dataset contains massive information about 258k+ films:

• Basics: genres, runtimes, starting year, is for adult or not, language, region ···

• Crews: directors, writers ···

• Principal cast: category, role, characters as well as their birth year, profession ···

• Rating: average rating on IMDB, number of votes ···

Other than that, we also use an external data sources numbers to combine commercial statistics of 6,000+ movies released to theaters:

• Budget: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets/all

• Box office: https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/worldwide/all-movies/cumulative/all-time