Quantitative approaches for evaluating the influence of films using the IMDb database

Abstract

Why do films certain remain influential throughout film history? The purpose of this paper is to attempt to answer this question. To do so, we adopt some quantitative approaches that facilitate an objective interpretation of the data. The data source we have chosen for this study is the Internet Online Movie Database (IMDb), and in particular, one of its sections called "Connections", which lists references made to a film in subsequent movies and references made in the film itself to previous ones. The extraction and analysis of these networks of citations allows us to draw some conclusions about the most influential movies in film history, identifying their distinguishing features, and considering how their popularity has evolved over time.

Identification of key films and personalities in the history of cinema from a Western perspective

“…In Wasserman et al (2015), the authors study the correlation between several metrics on movies (metacritic score2, IMDb rating, box office, number of citations received, and PageRank score) and the presence of movies in the United States Library of Congress’s National Film Registry (NFR), the selection of films for preservation in the Library of Congress of United States, but their analysis are limited to movies produced in United States. In Canet et al (2016), the network of citations across movies supplied by IMDb is employed for studying the most inspiring movies and how their influence has evolved over the years. The authors found that the inspiration of recent movies comes predominantly from the ones produced in the 70’s and 80’s, with some films from classical periods that still have a huge influence.…”

“…Summarizing, both common methods used for evaluating the success of films exhibit great limitations: for this reason, some researches have started to propose alternative techniques to tackle this problem. The most promising ones are based on the references that a movie receives from other ones released after it (Wasserman et al 2015; Spitz and Horvát 2014; Wasserman et al 2018; Canet et al 2016): the network of citations among movies is collected, and a success score for each movie is computed through graph centrality algorithms, or other techniques borrowed from Network Analysis. The key intuition behind these methods is that a successful movie — it does not matter whether for economic or artistic merits — will be probably known and referenced by some of the successive ones, for honoring it or for trying to reproduce its outstanding performance.…”

“…It is composed by a combination of four well-established centrality scores for graphs: in-degree, closeness, harmonic and PageRank. Other researchers have already employed similar techniques (such as Wasserman et al (2015); Spitz and Horvát (2014); Canet et al (2016)), but they selected different centrality scores for their measures: in “Motivations” section we explain in details the motivations under our choice of these four specific centralities. The network of references we use for calculating our score has been inferred from the publicly available subset of IMDb: it is composed by more than 47,000 films produced in several countries from 1920 to 2010.…”

Why imaginary worlds? The psychological foundations and cultural evolution of fictions with imaginary worlds

“…Several other fictions can be mentioned: Star Wars , the most successful fiction merchandising franchise of all time (Block & Wilson, 2010) and arguably the most influential movie in the history of films (Canet, 2016); Harry Potter , the best-selling book series in history, translated into 80 languages; Game of Thrones , whose final episode set the all-time audience record for a TV series with 16.4 million people watching it live and 15 million people streaming it later; The Legend of Zelda , one of the best-selling video game series worldwide, with over 100 million video games sold since the first one; and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a shared imaginary world including a series of super hero films with common settings and characters, which cumulates several records in the history of cinema, including the highest opening week gross ( Avengers: Endgame ), the biggest opening week-end ( Avengers: Infinity War ) and, more significatively, the highest-grossing movie of all time ( Avengers: Endgame ). A more quantitative approach confirms that fictions with imaginary worlds are highly successful in recent times: the numbers of novels with imaginary worlds and the number of films with imaginary worlds have considerably increased in the last 100 years, both in absolute terms and relatively to the global levels of production of novels and films (Dubourg, Thouzeau, de Dampierre, & Baumard, 2021).…”

Количественный Подход К Оценке Влияния Литературных Произведений С Использованием Теории Графов

“…В частности, для каждого фильма есть раздел под названием «Связи», в котором содержится список ссылок на похожие фильмы. Анализируя эту сеть цитирования, можно исследовать пригодность метрик для оценки значимости фильма на основе распространения влияния в мире кино [8,12].…”