Skip to main content

Is This Movie a Milestone? Identification of the Most Influential Movies in the History of Cinema

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Complex Networks & Their Applications VI (COMPLEX NETWORKS 2017)

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 689))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

The success of a movie is usually measured through its box-office revenue or the opinion of professional critics, but such measures may be influenced by external factors, such as advertisement or trends, and are not able to capture the impact over time of a film. A more efficient measure should account to what extent a given movie has influenced other movies produced after its release, from both the artistic and the economic point of view. Hence, we propose a ranking method for movies based on the network of citations between them, obtained by combining several centrality indexes. We apply our method on a subset of the IMDb citation network consisting of around 65, 000 international movies, and we derive a list of films that can be considered milestones in the history of cinema. For each movie we also collect its year of release, genres and countries of production, and we analyze such features for finding trends and patterns in the film industry.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 259.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 329.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 329.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    An example of this calculation is performed by Box Office Mojo, available at http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm.

  2. 2.

    Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of media products, showing an average score for each item. It is available at http://www.metacritic.com/.

  3. 3.

    http://www.imdb.com/stats.

  4. 4.

    Available at http://www.imdb.com/interfaces.

  5. 5.

    Available as jupyter notebooks at https://github.com/bioglio/most-influential-films.

  6. 6.

    Available at https://networkx.github.io/.

  7. 7.

    Available at https://www.rottentomatoes.com.

  8. 8.

    Available at https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry/complete-national-film-registry-listing/.

  9. 9.

    The rank of 1998 is availabe at http://www.afi.com/100years/movies.aspx, while the rank of 2007 is available at http://www.afi.com/100years/movies10.aspx.

References

  1. Anderson, S.E., Albertson, S., Shavlik, D.: How the motion picture industry miscalculates box office receipts. Inland Emp. Bus. J. 25(11), 16–24 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Bakker, G.: The economic history of the international film industry. Eh, Net Encyclopedia of Economic History (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Barabási, A.L., Albert, R.: Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science 286(5439), 509–512 (1999)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  4. Bavelas, A.: Communication patterns in task-oriented groups. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 22(6), 725–730 (1950)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Bioglio, L., Rho, V., Pensa, R.G.: Measuring the inspiration rate of topics in bibliographic networks. In: Proceedings of DS 2017 (2017, to appear)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Boldi, P., Vigna, S.: Axioms for centrality. Internet Math. 10(3–4), 222–262 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Brin, S., Page, L.: The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. Comput. Netw. and ISDN Syst. 30(1), 107–117 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Canet, F., Valero, M.Á., Codina, L.: Quantitative approaches for evaluating the influence of films using the imdb database. Comunicación y Soc. 29(2), 151 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Dekker, A.: Conceptual distance in social network analysis. J. Soc. Struct. (JOSS) 6 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Dhar, T., Sun, G., Weinberg, C.B.: The long-term box office performance of sequel movies. Mark. Lett. 23(1), 13–29 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Elgammal, A., Saleh, B.: Quantifying creativity in art networks. In: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC 2015), pp. 39–46. Brigham Young University (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Eom, Y.H., Jeon, C., Jeong, H., Kahng, B.: Evolution of weighted scale-free networks in empirical data. Phys. Rev. E 77(5), 056105 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Gallos, L.K., Potiguar, F.Q., Andrade Jr., J.S., Makse, H.A.: Imdb network revisited: unveiling fractal and modular properties from a typical small-world network. PloS One 8(6), e66443 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Gleiser, P.M., Danon, L.: Community structure in jazz. Adv. Complex Syst. 6(04), 565–573 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Hagberg, A.A., Schult, D.A., Swart, P.J.: Exploring network structure, dynamics, and function using networkx. In: Proceedings of the 7th Python in Science Conference, pp. 11–15 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Hennig-Thurau, T., Wiertz, C., Feldhaus, F.: Does twitter matter? The impact of microblogging word of mouth on consumers’ adoption of new movies. J. Acad. Mark. Sci. 43(3), 375–394 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Hirsch, J.E.: An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 102(46), 16569 (2005)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  18. Holbrook, M.B.: The role of ordinary evaluations in the market for popular culture: do consumers have “Good Taste”? Mark. Lett. 16(2), 75–86 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Kaur, J., Ferrara, E., Menczer, F., Flammini, A., Radicchi, F.: Quality versus quantity in scientific impact. J. Inf. 9(4), 800–808 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Liu, Y.: Word of mouth for movies: its dynamics and impact on box office revenue. J. Mark. 70(3), 74–89 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Park, J., Celma, O., Koppenberger, M., Cano, P., Buldú, J.M.: The social network of contemporary popular musicians. Int. J. Bifurc. Chaos 17(07), 2281–2288 (2007)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  22. Pautz, M.C.: The decline in average weekly cinema attendance, 1930–2000. Issues Polit. Econ. 11 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Petersen, A.M., Fortunato, S., Pan, R.K., Kaski, K., Penner, O., Rungi, A., Riccaboni, M., Stanley, H.E., Pammolli, F.: Reputation and impact in academic careers. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 111(43), 15316–15321 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Prag, J., Casavant, J.: An empirical study of the determinants of revenues and marketing expenditures in the motion picture industry. J. Cult. Econ. 18(3), 217–235 (1994)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Renoust, B., Claver, V., Baffier, J.F.: Flows of knowledge in citation networks. In: International Workshop on Complex Networks and their Applications, pp. 159–170. Springer (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Rochat, Y.: Closeness centrality extended to unconnected graphs: the harmonic centrality index. In: Applications of Social Network Analysis (ASNA 2009) (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Sadoul, G.: Histoire du cinéma mondial : Des origines à nos jours. Flammarion (1976)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Sinatra, R., Deville, P., Szell, M., Wang, D., Barabási, A.L.: A century of physics. Nat. Phys. 11(10), 791 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Sinatra, R., Wang, D., Deville, P., Song, C., Barabási, A.L.: Quantifying the evolution of individual scientific impact. Science 354(6312), aaf5239 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Spitz, A., Horvát, E.Á.: Measuring long-term impact based on network centrality: unraveling cinematic citations. PloS One 9(10), e108857 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Wasko, J.: The death of hollywood: exaggeration or reality? In: The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications, pp. 305–330 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Wasserman, M., Zeng, X.H.T., Amaral, L.A.N.: Cross-evaluation of metrics to estimate the significance of creative works. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 112(5), 1281–1286 (2015)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  33. Zhu, K.: Internet-based distribution of digital videos: the economic impacts of digitization on the motion picture industry. Electron. Mark. 11(4), 273–280 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Livio Bioglio .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Bioglio, L., Pensa, R.G. (2018). Is This Movie a Milestone? Identification of the Most Influential Movies in the History of Cinema. In: Cherifi, C., Cherifi, H., Karsai, M., Musolesi, M. (eds) Complex Networks & Their Applications VI. COMPLEX NETWORKS 2017. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 689. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72150-7_74

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72150-7_74

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-72149-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-72150-7

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics