IMDb Scrollytelling Story

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Comparing Films by MPA Certification from the Internation Movie Database’s Top 250: a Scrolly-telly by Nic Bacchini

For this project I wanted to visualize statistics from the IMDb website. The data used was gathered from the IMDb list of top 250 movies using beautiful soup 4.

Lets begin by taking a look at ratings or “certificates” of these acknowledged movies.

The suitability scores, whose logo we have come to know from the beginning of our films, are from the Motion Picture Association (MPA).

Their rating system, while well known, is not a legally enforcable mechanism. Thus we see films who choose to opt out of this voluntary system to be the “Unrated” certificate we see on the charts.

While theatrical releases of films get one rating, the at home release might get another, indicating the additional material that was not a part of the original showings.

Lets dive into data for the earlier films, from before 2000.

Rated R and Unrated look to be the closest with R winning with over 50 entries.

The early 2000s came with the increasing push for mass adoption of the DVD/player. This brought about a few quirky consumer habits including the extra content that would not be judged as the theatrical release was.

Marketing for “Unrated” releases became a common place advertising tactic. Can this shift be seen even at the more critical environments like IMDb.com?

In the 21st century we actually see a decline.

The other change here is the evolution of the suitability finding a new score. NC-17 was introduced in 1990 and was made to separate the artistic content.

Overall, it looks the as though R ratings take more additions from both before and after 2000 than any other.

Is this the whole story? what else can we see?

Given these views we can better understand the changes between the time periods.

The larger the dark red of the bar, the more movies on the list from that classifcation gained after 2000.

From these radars we can see that while there were less unrated films made after 2000 included, their rating from IMDb users was on average higher.

The real winner or certification that gained the most proportionally before and after 2000 that ended up with the highest ratings was PG-13

Reasons for this can range from the amount of audience members willing or able to see a movie of that rating to studios purposfully creating cinema that will appeal to the broadest audience / customer base possible.

From this data we saw that the Unrated phenomenon of the early 2000’s was not a identifiable trend when viewing the top rated movies from IMDb released between 1921 and 2025.

[1] "R Rated Movies Data:"

# A tibble: 2 × 5
  time_period rating gross    votes count
  <chr>        <dbl> <dbl>    <dbl> <int>
1 After 2000    8.26  225.  884674.    47
2 Before 2000   8.39  124. 1049381.    55

[1] "Unrated Movies Data:"

# A tibble: 2 × 4
  time_period rating gross   votes
  <chr>        <dbl> <dbl>   <dbl>
1 After 2000    8.32 73.8  174348.
2 Before 2000   8.25  3.25 192962.

# A tibble: 6 × 3
  certificate avg_rating count
  <chr>            <dbl> <int>
1 PG-13             8.38    34
2 R                 8.33   102
3 NC-17             8.3      1
4 PG                8.28    38
5 Unrated           8.27    57
6 G                 8.26    18

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