Was it better in the Old Days?

All of us have watched movies for a very long time. Forgive me, my powers of observation are incredibly astute. However, I have always held a certain belief about the quality of modern movies. Rarely do I go to the theater expecting to see an excellent movie. My expectations have been driven so low that it practically don’t exist, this includes the ones I am excited about. I came to a conclusion: in the 21st there are far more bad movies made than good movies. The gap is wider than it has ever been before.

A good friend of mine, who shall hence forth be known as Liberating Panther, takes the opposite opinion. The gap only seems to be worse because we are living in it right now, but in reality the gap has remained roughly the same, no matter which movie era we are in. This argument has passed between us multiple times and we have never come to a conclusion. To clarify, here are some of the reasons for my stance: Technological advancements allow anyone to produce a film with no regards to quality, audience tastes have drifted towards flashy cg and special effects at the expense of plot and characters, and movie makers stay in their comfort zones to earn more money. Of course, nothing is inherently wrong with any of these reasons. Film producers make a movie to entertain an audience in hopes of making huge profits. Yet, the movie industry seems to prefer quantity or quality. Instead of doing a review, I decided to do a little experiment to determine which one of us was more correct.

The International Movie Database is the largest collection of information on movies that I know of. On the site users can rate movies on a scale one to ten. One being the worst and ten being the highest. For my experiment, I looked at three different years. I divided movies into three categories: good, mediocre, and bad for each year based on the user scores. After counting out the total movies movies made in a specific year, I calculated the total and transformed it into a percent. Below is the data I gathered:

1935: 1,627 movies were made. 731 have a user score (will be used as the total).

# of good movies (7 or above): 109

# of mediocre movies (5 or 6.9): 540

# of bad movies (4.9 or below): 82

# of movies with without a rating: 896

Good movies as a percent of the total = 109/731 = 14.9%

Bad movies as a percent of the total = 82/731 = 11.2%

Mediocre and bad movies = 622/731 = 85%

1960: 2,215 movies were made. 1005 have a user score (will be used as the total.)

# of good movies: 158

# of mediocre movies: 614

# of bad movies: 233

# of movies without a rating: 1210

Good movies as a percent of the total = 158/1005 = 15.7%

Bad movies as a percent of the total = 233/1005 = 23.2%

Mediocre and bad movies = 847/1005 = 84.2%

1982: 2619 movies were made. 1603 have a user score (will be used a total).

# of good movies: 245

# of mediocre movies: 867

# of bad movies: 491

# of movies with no rating: 1016

Good movies as a percent of the total = 245/1603 = 15.2%

Bad movies as percent of the total = 491/1603 = 30%

Mediocre and bad movies = 1358/1603 = 84%

2009: 6,781 movies were made. 4379 have a user score (will be used as total).

# of good movies: 363

# of mediocre movies: 2,370

# of bad movies: 1,646

# of movies with a no rating: 2402

Good movies as a percent of the total = 363/4379 = 8%.

Bad movies as a percent of the total = 1646/4379 = 37.6%

Mediocre and bad movies = 4016/4379 = 92%

2012: 8,490 movies were made. 4306 movies have a user rating (will be used as total).

# of good movies: 595

# of mediocre movies: 2150

# of bad movies: 1561

# of movies with a rating: 4184

Good movies as a percent of the total = 595/4306 = 13.8%

Bad movies as a percent of the total = 1561/4306 = 36.2%

Mediocre and bad movies = 3711/4306 = 86%

I added 2012 in just to see how much percent variation there in a small span of time. The difference is small, but a very interesting increase in good movie percentage. 

The data supports my stance: the percent of bad movies per year has steadily increased over time. We live in an era where almost a 1/4 of the movies made are terrible and it is growing worse. As movie making technology became more available, more movies were made (generally perceived as a good thing). Yet, when comparing these years together, the number of good movies remained a small percent of the total. The bad movie ratios do not stay the same, thus, I conclude that overall movie quality is worse today than it was in earlier times. I wish that was enough, but unfortunately it is unfair to Liberating Panther and to my readers. The data has a few problems:

1. The lack of user ratings. For each year there was a number of movies that had no information or rating. It is possible that the missing data would support my friend’s stance instead of my own.
2. The ratings are based on modern movie audiences looking back on older movies. My friend believes that society often has nostalgia goggles about a whole plethora of issues, movies are no exception. The tendency to say, “things were better in the old days” is rather strong. Movies may be considered a certain way by today’s movies standards, but the audience’s opinions could have been very different when it first showed. This data does not reflect the opinions of audiences in 1935 or 1960. It would have been very difficult to track down this information, so I didn’t bother.
3. I am assuming the IMDB has accounts for all the movies made in a certain year. Their database could be missing entries. 1935 was a long time ago, recording keeping was harder back then. Lesser quality movies may not have been persevered.
4. IMDB catalogs movies from all over the world, not just the United States. My conversations with Liberating Panther on this issue focused mainly on movies in the U.S.

Even with the data, my stance is still assumption. An unbelievable amount of research is probably needed to determine whether myself or Liberating Panther is correct. Either way, this was an interesting little experiment.