Where to find a database of all movies made?

May 31, 2010 12:47 PM

Is there a relatively complete movie database in csv or other Excel-friendly formats?

I'm occasionally interested in running quick, short data analysis on movies. This came to the forefront recently when I read a NYT article about long movie titles that I thought rang false. I was looking for a list of every major studio movie released to try and run this analysis, but the closest I could find was potentially dubious box office records. Has anyone come across anything like this? Or do I have to build it on my own?

posted by AmitinLA to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: How about the data from the iMDB that's available via FTP? It states that "The data is NOT FREE although it may be used for free in specific circumstances" so you'll have to read their terms and decide for yourself if what you want to do is OK.
posted by bcwinters at 12:54 PM on May 31, 2010

Best answer: You might also consider using TMDb.

From the site:

"themoviedb.org is a free and open movie database. It's completely user driven by people like you. TMDb is currently used by millions of people every month and with our powerful API, also used by many popular media centers like Moovida, XBMC, Plex, MythTV and MediaPortal."
posted by SNACKeR at 2:29 PM on May 31, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks, those were both great sources.
posted by AmitinLA at 5:57 PM on May 31, 2010