IMDb | What To Watch?

Sifting through 7 million titles for the Top 500…

4 min readApr 8, 2021

Yet another hyper local lock-down looms large around the world. From the slew of what to watch? questions coming our way, it appears that our binge watching buddies are at the end of their line. Patience — in discovering the next thing to watch — is wearing thin. The task of googling each title and peering at multiple ratings before making a time commitment decision is a rather laborious exercise.

Help with Discovery on What To Watch? would be a welcome antidote.

We ran down the rabbit hole of the comprehensive IMDb datasets, for some fun aggregation and organization. We sifted through 7 million titles across languages and genres, to arrive at the top 500 titles to watch.

Filtering focused on the following categories across genres:

Movies, TV Series, and Mini Series.

Several shows/movies have multiple genre tags with contrasting themes (e.g. horror, comedy). In such cases, such titles may likely appear across multiple genres. The dataset includes shows/movies from multiple languages, genres, across time.

111 Year Big Picture

A very long timeline view of IMDb Ratings, across all Genres.

The past century has seen an explosion of content (more correctly, explosion of content that carry an IMDb Rating!). It would appear that the 1920s were Peak Ratings era. Over the next century, ratings fell. We, the audience, perhaps became more demanding, and/or discerning, of content.

Something flipped since 2010 (Netflix). Along with an increase in title count, average Ratings have been trending higher over the 2010s decade. Let’s hope the trend continues, as more players (Apple) enter the content development/ownership game.

Genre Viewer

Viewing Guide: Each picture has 3 panels.

In the clockwise direction:

IMDB Rating by Release Year: A historical timeline of IMDB Ratings for a specific genre, by Release Year.
Genre List: A snapshot list of the top rated names in each genre. This would be the most useful panel for TLDR readers; who may want to quickly know the list of top things to watch in each genre.
IMDB Ratings and Number of Votes: A plot that depicts high Ratings and number of votes.

Horror

Thriller

Mystery

Crime

Comedy

Drama

Science Fiction

History

Biography

Documentary

War

Prominent clustering of War titles around World War 2 (1940s), Korea War (1950s) and Vietnam War (1950–70s). Noticeable pickup in the post-2000 period.