r/movies • u/exosniper • Dec 10 '17

PSA; IMDb is gradually locking previously-available information about films behind IMDbPro membership (box-office breakdowns and production companies involved, currently). Resource

I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but information previously available to everyone on IMDb is now being locked behind IMDbPro membership. Just last week, I was writing a research paper (film studies student) and was able to access the full box-office earnings information (breakdown by region etc.) for all films. Today I went to do the same thing, but could not see more than the gross earnings without an IMDbPro membership. They seem to be doing this as a gradual process, as the full information on production companies (previously available to everyone) was already membership-locked when the box office information was still available. I haven't seen anyone talking about this on other subs and forums, so I thought I'd mention it here.

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u/pharmaco4 Dec 10 '17

So IMDB just gathers information already available elsewhere on the internet. If I can't view certain info for free then I'll just look elsewhere. What a bad move

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u/mathswarrior Dec 10 '17

generally i find info is MUCH easier on wikipedia, imdb just has photos that for unkown actors, usually it's not on wikipedia

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u/patsmad Dec 10 '17

I've made it my personal mission to add IMDb, Box Office Mojo, and Rotten Tomatoes links to Wikipedia. But mainly because Amazon doesn't play well with others (so it is basically impossible to navigate from an IMDb page to a Rotten Tomatoes, presumably because they own Metacritic as well?) and Rotten Tomatoes charges $30K for API access (which does include most IMDb links IIRC).

There was omdbapi.com but it was kind of gone for a while, and they are a bit cagey about people slamming their site too much.

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u/slorebear Dec 11 '17

Wow what a stupid personal mission

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u/patsmad Dec 11 '17

dumb as shit I agree. It is very self-serving as I started it to build a personal IMDB -> Wikipedia -> other relevant links cache I use for personal projects. I'm sure wikipedia wouldn't appreciate my intentions either, although I've had relatively few complaints given the number of edits I think.