Fun with IMDb

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) should be a familiar destination for all movie fans, because they are the only place online where you can find out about nearly every movie ever made. Even Netflix doesn't do that.

You can go year-by-year to find the top movies by boxoffice or MOVIEMeter(tm) rating, which is how I look for movies to put in my Netlfix queue, sometimes.

IMDb maintains a constantly-updated list of the top 250 movies by MOVIEMeter(tm). I would like to brag about how many I've seen of them. How do I keep track? I use 250films.net. 250films.net is a well-made site where you can actually check off the films you've seen. Click on this button to see which ones I've seen:




Here is another cool site for looking at the IMDb Top 250, where you can see monthly snapshots of the list going back to 1997, as well as do month-to-month comparisons to see which titles have been added or moved up or down.

Netflix brings movies out of obscurity

First, I noticed a new movie called Numb on the Netflix new releases page, in the Sci-Fi & Fantasy genre. I like Sci-Fi very much, so clicked through. No one on Netflix has reviewed it yet, and it's been rated only 26 times. That's an obscure movie. I decided to check Numb on IMDB to see if I could learn more. (Can you believe there have been five movies in the last six years named "Numb"?). I scrolled down. Didn't recognize any of the cast or crew. It's done zero at the boxoffice. There's only two user reviews. But at the bottom, a teaser for the Moviemeter (tm) showed that this movie is climbing rapidly out of obscurity at a rate of 37% since last week.

Wanna know why?

I think it's because it's on Netflix's New Releases page. Since the movie was released on DVD a year ago, on April 2, 2006, its highest rank on IMDB was 39,429 on April 23, 2006. It went down to 74259 on Jan 7, 2007. This year, its average rank was 55,269, until this week. Since Netflix has offered the title, its rank has risen to 33,144.

What do you think?