Could use a colour key in all the negative space in bottom right. Interesting data nevertheless.
It’s in the upper right, at the top.
Negative space!
Negative space is a good thing. It pushes the eye to what’s important.
And not a single woman, if I’m not mistaken! And probably all white except for Miyazaki?
Akira Kurosawa is #18.
But what would you expect? It’s a ranking based on IMDB scores. It’s got nothing to do with diversity.
Hollywood has a long history of primarily funding films made and mostly starring white men, which gives them the resources to make higher quality films with stars that have more practice resulting in a far better chance of putting out a widely known and higher quality product. That isn’t saying anything negative about anyone else, just that when you filter out women and minorities from the directing role and give them fewer and less experienced stars and production crews funded at a lower rate, the odds of being high quality and getting attention is far lower.
Also note how many of the listed films are blockbusters, or at least were highly promoted and widely distributed.
There is something to be said about the number of women and minority directors that have highly rated films with far fewer than 50k ratings total, due to both a smaller output and less public recognition. Their exclusion is a sign of the lack of engagement by the audience, probably for the same systemic issues of racism and misogyny.
It is a self reinforcing system, and calling it out is important but certainly isn’t a surprise.
Akira Kurosawa
Japanese, male.
Why the 50k vote requirement? This basically ensures that only blockbuster films and their directors appear in this chart, with a near complete bias towards large American productions.
I’d guess to make sure the score was averaged across a decent sized pool to minimize outliers.
Yes, but it does introduce a bias. The Nolan scores illustrate that well. Best not to view this as some objectively the best metric.
It’d be interesting to provide different slices of the voting data to view different biases. Last time I looked at IMDb voting they had demographics too such as age and gender. Along with voting size, it’d be interesting to see different slices and what they like. Older women? Younger women with less than 10,000 votes? Films where older people liked it more than younger and vice versa?
I Always found the rating on IMDB totally misleading. I guess they work for the US public, but many good movies have low rating…
If you want to know what the public thinks about a movie, go to imdb. If you want to know what film nerds think about a movie, go to letterboxd.
I prefer filmaffinity… I’m 90% in line with those ratings
Interesting, I use imdb to see if some movies with bad reviews are actually still worth watching. Like I don’t really care if there’s a bunch of plot holes if the movie is actually fun to watch and imdb is usually more forgiving in that way.
There were only two names I didn’t recognize, but I recognized a few of their movies. A few of the ones I recognized have films that I know about, but haven’t watched.
It certainly confirms how much impact a director has on the overall quality of a film.
Laughs in Ingmar Bergman.
Hey my favorite director barely made it in at #30 🎉