Worldwide Box Office: Respect is Earned, Not Given

I understand. You found paradise in films, you had a good trade, you made a good living. The police protected you and there were courts of law. You didn't need a friend like me. But, now you come to me, and you say: 'Don Corleone, give me a good film.' But you don't ask with respect. You don't offer friendship. You don't even think to call me Godfather. Instead, you come into my house on the day my daughter is to be married, and you ask me what is the most ranked movie. - The Godfather

One way to discover great movies and brush up on your movie trivia is through browsing the Internet Movie Database - better known as IMDb - which is one of the most popular sources for film, TV, and celebrity-biography content. More than 250 million people visit the site each month. The IMDb database includes more than 185 million data points related to the more than 3 million film and television productions included in its database.

• Movie information IADb includes: box-office data, showtimes, and cast, credits, and other descriptive statistics. Full filmography is available for cast and crew.
• Thanks to registered users of IMDB, ratings based on a 10-star scale are available for the each movie and television show.
• IMDb also provides adjusted gross earnings estimated on movies based on 2017 ticket price ($8.84). So, if 'Gone with the Wind' (1939) box office earnings were less than $200 million, adjusted for ticket price inflation, today's earnings would be $1.8 billion.

Movies today tend to better meet viewers' expectations than in decades past. While box office earnings may provide better insight into how desirable a movie was before viewing, an IMDb ranking is a useful indicator of the impression a movie makes on actual viewers, helping us to understand if movies live up to their hype.

• A comparison of gross worldwide box office earnings and IMDb ratings for the highest grossing films in each year from 1989 to 2017 consistently shows modern films out shining those released prior to 2010.
• The worst rated among the highest grossing movies of the 1990s (Mission: Impossible II) has an IMDb rating of 6.1; the highest grossing of the 2000s (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End) rates 7.1 stars; and in the current decade, Frozen earns 7.5 stars.
• There is another plausible explanation for this correlation between box office earnings and IMDb ratings: maybe the user base and/or attitudes toward the movies being rated has shifted through time, resulting in more recent releases earning more stars. Dig into the data below to decide for yourself.

Note: IMDb ratings change daily data. Data below were collected on April 20, 2017.