The evolving perception of controversial movies

TL;DR

This study analyzes the polarization of movie ratings on IMDb from 1915 to 2015, revealing trends of decreasing controversy with popularity and a gradual convergence to mainstream opinions over decades.

Contribution

Introduces two indexes for measuring controversy in movie ratings and uncovers temporal trends in polarization and consensus in cultural ratings.

Findings

Controversy decreases with movie popularity.

Recent movies tend to be more controversial.

There is a 40-50 year convergence to mainstream opinions.

Abstract

Polarization of opinion is an important feature of public debate on political, social and cultural topics. The availability of large internet databases of users' ratings has permitted quantitative analysis of polarization trends-for instance, previous studies have included analyses of controversial topics on Wikipedia, as well as the relationship between online reviews and a product's perceived quality. Here, we study the dynamics of polarization in the movie ratings collected by the Internet Movie database (IMDb) website in relation to films produced over the period 1915-2015. We define two statistical indexes, dubbed hard and soft controversiality, which quantify polarized and uniform rating distributions, respectively. We find that controversy decreases with popularity and that hard controversy is relatively rare. Our findings also suggest that more recent movies are more controversial than older ones and we detect a trend of "convergence to the mainstream" with a time scale of roughly 40-50 years. This phenomenon appears qualitatively different from trends observed in both online reviews of commercial products and in political debate, and we speculate that it may be connected with the absence of long-lived "echo chambers" in the cultural domain. This hypothesis can and should be tested by extending our analysis to other forms of cultural expression and/or to databases with different demographic user bases.