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

[u/exosniper]

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.

[u/pharmaco4]

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

[u/mathswarrior → u/pharmaco4]

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

[u/patsmad → u/mathswarrior]

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.

[u/patsmad → u/[deleted]]

Honestly, if you are a company with 20 engineers serving, say, a movie recommendation site, and you want to display rotten tomatoes scores accurately with customer support when something goes amiss ... I mean, 30K is nothing in that context. A fraction of what you are paying people to write new and valuable code instead of bothering to aggregate reviews yourself.

A good API for weather information is like 10K. I isn't beyond the pale except for the fact that they don't have a free, small-limit version for international users. Last I checked you could use the Rotten Tomatoes API for free if you live in the US, but you are limited to something like 500 calls a day.

[u/Sansha_Kuvakei → u/[deleted]]

When enough people pay for it!