Writing the first words of my first post reminds me of a not very memorable line from a great film that for some reason has stuck with me.
“Come on down to the ballpark if you’re in the area, and if you’re listening to this you must be in the area because this isn’t a very powerful radio station,” says the perfectly cast play-by-play man in A League Of Their Own.
In other words, mine this time, I don’t have a very wide social network and thus am not expecting much readership. Does a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it make a sound? Who the hell knows, but it sure has a lot of freedom.
So a bit about me.
For the last few years, I’ve been laboring in (shudders saying the term) stealth mode on an ambitious and exciting cinema platform that will likely launch sometime in 2022. While I can’t speak much about what that will eventually be, leading the construction of it has been a journey of the unexpected.
Unexpected lessons, triumphs, challenges, and everything in between. One of the more exciting items in the unexpected category has been the discovery of things that I never thought would interest me that have suddenly, you guessed it, interested me.
In fact, interest is kind of an undersell. I’ve discovered new obsessions, rabbit holes that I can dig and return to any time. One of those increasingly plunging rabbit holes is a fascination with all the data that surrounds films.
Yes. Data. Boring old data.
The gateway to this obsession seemed innocuous at the time. I had to find an efficient way to create a wide set of consistent metadata across an array of film titles (many thousands of them). And so I set out to build a couple of different tools to help facilitate this process.
As the information started pouring in, I found myself increasingly fascinated with the narratives that emerged. I gained insights into not only the films themselves but also where they resided across the marketplace. This then led me to apply the same level of analytics to those platforms that featured these films. Connecting these elemental morsels of data together shined a spotlight in areas that I had either never been, or were re-discovering for what felt like the first time.
That’s when I realized that data could be used as a powerful film discovery mechanism when presented correctly. As the market explodes before our eyes, decision fatigue becomes chronic, and a swell of new content is piped into our homes seemingly every day, boring old data should be looked at as a tool in the toolbox to help us make some sense of the madness.
And so I was inspired to share some of those discoveries in the hopes that it might help guide you on your journey through film as well.
By signing up for this newsletter, you will receive weekly posts detailing a latest discovery as well as useable information on how you can apply it to your own film journey.
I’ll leave you with an example.
There are currently 374 films with a perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes score. Of those titles, 141 of them are not available to stream on any platform in the United States. Which platforms currently have the most of these films? Check it out.
In my next post, I will provide more interactive data for you to see exactly which of these movies are on what platforms as well as a few other curious insights to go along with it. I’ll always aim to send this out on Friday so it could factor into any weekend viewing plans.
Thanks for joining me on this expedition. Please subscribe by hitting the button below and if you feel up to it tell your friends!
Until next time.
Getting Meta
Excited to join you on your journey!