Collection Statistics

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Every age from 6 to 17, counted across all 2146 films. Each number is my estimate of the age at which a viewer has the equipment to get something real out of the film. The most common age is 14 with 632 films, then 12 with 452, and 1591 films sit at 12 or above, which is a fair summary of who I keep films for. Only 174 land below 10, since a film that asks little of an adult usually asks little of a child either.

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Complexity age against release decade, across the full 1902 to 2026 span. The mean holds in the 11s from the 1920s through the studio years, steps up to 13.0 in the 1960s, and has stayed within a year of that since, so what I pick has been steady for sixty years.

All 19 TMDB genres, area proportional to film count. Drama covers 1245 films (58% of the list) and swallows most of the canvas, so on its own the tag tells me almost nothing. The smaller tiles, Thriller at 523 and Crime at 429 downwards, are where the label starts to carry information.

How often two genres land on the same film, drawn wherever a pair shares at least 20 films: 53 pairs clear that line. The thick ribbons are TMDB's habitual couplings, and I find the thin threads around the rim better company, since a film sitting between two things at once usually has a reason for it. Hover a segment to isolate one genre's relationships.

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Films per decade from 1902 to 2026, stacked by the six most common genres with everything else grouped as Other. Far less was made in the early decades and less of it survives, so those bars stay thin. The genre mix shifting underneath the totals is the part I watch.

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Median runtime per decade with an interquartile band around it. The collection's overall median is 108 minutes, and the band is the half of the chart I find revealing: it shows which eras broadly agreed on how long a film should be and which ones argued about it.

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The 25 directors with the most films here. The lead is 23 films, held by Steven Spielberg, with Martin Scorsese next at 19, then the tail flattens fast: 1126 directors are represented in all, and 676 of them by a single film.

Pick any of the 1126 directors to plot every one of their films in the collection across the years, positioned by how many stars it carries. A career reads at a glance: an early run of astonishing work followed by a long middle, a steady climb, or the late turn nobody saw coming.

The most frequent words across all 2146 titles, sized by how often they appear. A title is the one part of a film written to be remembered, so in bulk they record what each era thought a film ought to be called. Click any word to search the collection for it.

Mean complexity age for each of the 19 genres. Family sits alone at 9.1, and the rest land between 10.8 (Animation) and 13.7 (War), under three years apart, so genre predicts what a film is about far better than it predicts how much the film asks of you.

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Each bubble is a genre: horizontal position is its mean complexity age, vertical position is its film count, and radius is the standard deviation of age within it. A wide bubble is a genre running all the way from a children's film to a punishing one; a tight one holds to a single level.

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The 30 most common themes out of a closed vocabulary of 304, which every one of the 2146 films is scored against (two to five themes each, four being typical). The list is led by moral ambiguity at 431 films, well clear of survival at 277 and grief at 239, and even the shortest bar here, deception & con artistry, turns up 55 times. The vocabulary is fixed and applied to the whole collection, so this is a census rather than a sample: these 30 carry 38% of the 8663 theme assignments in the data, and the other 274 themes split the rest.

Three levels reach this site. One star (earns its place) at 1353 films, two stars (genuinely strong and worth the two hours) at 720, and three stars (I would put it in your hands whatever you usually watch) at 73. A fourth level stays in the data and never appears here, so everything you see has already been through that filter.

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Rating mix as a percentage within each complexity age, so the thinly populated bands sit on the same footing as the crowded ones. The question I put to it is whether I quietly reward the harder films for being harder.

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The same percentage view across release decades. Watch for a slope: where the older decades score higher, that is survivorship talking, since eighty years of other people's forgetting has already cleared the weak films out of my way.

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Every crew member with at least 12 credits in the collection, linked wherever two of them worked on 3 or more of the same films: 64 people and 96 collaborations at these defaults, drawn from 13998 distinct person-and-role credits. Node size is credit count, the fill is the company a person keeps (the group of regular collaborators they settle into) and the ring is their main department; each hull is one such group, captioned with its best-connected member. Drop both controls to 10 and 2 and it opens out to 122 people and 243 links; raise the credit floor to 20 and it thins to 21 people, the handful of partnerships that survived entire careers. Focus puts one person at the centre with everyone they worked with more than once in a ring round them, whatever the thresholds; Matrix lays the best-connected people out as a grid, with the blocks along the diagonal the same groups the hulls show.

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The 19 genres, linked wherever at least 20 films carry both. Small enough to read directly, and the clusters it settles into map how this collection actually holds together far better than the alphabetical genre list on the browse page. Ring lays the same genres out on a circle so the edge weights can be read against the chord diagram above.

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The 16 themes that turn up on 80 films or more, linked wherever at least 9 films carry both, which gives 41 links and leaves nothing stranded on its own. Between them these 16 cover 1457 of the 2146 films. In the middle sits moral ambiguity, pairing with 12 of the others, its heaviest edge running to survival at 67 shared films, while out at the rim sits folklore & myth, the theme with the fewest partners above the cut, which is what a speciality looks like in a collection this size. The hulls are the communities the pairings fall into. Both cuts are there for legibility, since all 304 themes apply across the whole collection and drawing every one of them buries the labels in each other.