IMDb (formerly the Internet Movie Database) is an online database of movies, TV series, video games and the people behind them. Born in a Usenet film-fan community in 1990, it has been an Amazon subsidiary since 1998. It answers the everyday questions viewers ask: who is in this title, who made it, how is it rated, how much did it gross, and where can I watch it. According to IMDb's developer site, the database spans more than 12 million titles, 16 million cast, crew and entertainment professionals, and 1.9 billion user ratings, serving over 250 million monthly visitors (as of 2026-09-03). Unlike pure review communities, IMDb title pages combine full credits, release information, trailers, box office figures and user reviews in one place, and most of that data is contributed by users worldwide and reviewed by editors before it goes live — which is what makes IMDb one of the most widely cited sources of entertainment facts on the web.

At a Glance

  • URL: https://www.imdb.com/
  • Type: Entertainment database + user rating community
  • Cost: Free for general use, supported by advertising; IMDbPro is a paid subscription for industry professionals
  • Registration: Not required for browsing titles and charts; a free account is needed for ratings, reviews, Watchlist and data contributions
  • Languages: English is the only fully supported language; eight more (French, German, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and regional variants) are partially supported, partly via machine translation. No Chinese interface

Background

IMDb began as the personal movie diary of Col Needham, a British film fan and programmer. In a Film Independent interview, Needham recounts logging every film he watched from January 1980 onward and meeting like-minded fans through pre-web mailing lists and discussion groups — the volunteers maintaining actor and director lists on the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies. On October 17, 1990, he posted the search scripts for those lists to the group; that date counts as IMDb's birthday, when it was still downloadable software you ran on your own computer. The database moved onto the web in 1993 (initially hosted at Cardiff University), and in 1996 it incorporated in the UK and began selling advertising.

Amazon's April 27, 1998 press release announced the acquisition of Internet Movie Database Ltd. alongside two European online bookstores, with combined charges of roughly $55 million for all three deals, to support Amazon's eventual entry into online video sales. IMDb kept its brand and independent operation under Amazon, with Needham remaining CEO; in 2008 IMDb acquired the box office tracking site Box Office Mojo. On January 21, 2025, Needham moved to an Executive Chair role and former COO Nikki Santoro became only the second CEO in the company's 35-year history.

Title and Name Pages

Every title and every person gets its own page. A movie page typically includes the full cast and crew, plot summaries, release dates, technical specs, trivia, photos and trailers, a box office section, a parents guide and user reviews; name pages aggregate filmographies, mini-biographies and photos. Pages interlink by name and title, so "what else has this actor been in" is a few clicks deep at most. Per IMDb's help center, nearly all visible data is user-contributed: any registered user can submit additions or corrections through the "Edit page" button at the bottom of a page, staff verify submissions before they go live, and unverifiable submissions are declined.

Ratings and the Top 250

Registered users rate released titles on a 1–10 scale. The headline score is not an arithmetic mean but a weighted average: IMDb deliberately keeps the method private, adjusts weighting when it detects unusual voting activity, and recalculates ratings several times a day. Title pages also expose the full ratings breakdown, so you can tell whether opinion is uniform or polarized, and many pages show a Metacritic score alongside as a critics' counterpoint.

The best-known feature is the IMDb Top 250 Movies chart (with a separate Top 250 TV Shows chart). It counts only ratings from "regular voters" (criteria undisclosed), requires at least 25,000 ratings, and ranks titles with a published Bayesian weighted formula; the movies chart covers theatrical features only — no shorts, TV movies, miniseries or documentaries. As of 2026-09-03, The Shawshank Redemption leads the chart (9.3, about 3.2 million votes), followed by The Godfather and The Dark Knight. Separately, IMDb runs popularity charts (MOVIEmeter/STARmeter) based on actual page-view behavior of its monthly audience — a different signal from ratings.

Box Office and Box Office Mojo

The box office section on title pages, and much deeper box office analysis, come from IMDb's sister site Box Office Mojo: daily, weekend, weekly and lifetime grosses across domestic and international markets. IMDb's press room lists IMDbPro and Box Office Mojo as its products for industry professionals; for casual readers, Box Office Mojo is usually the quickest free way to check a film's worldwide gross.

Accounts and Data Access

A free account unlocks the Watchlist (with release notifications), ratings with CSV export of your history, user reviews, shareable lists, polls and check-ins, personalized recommendations, and data contributions (which earn badges). Reviews and similar features require signing in, which IMDb says keeps its review space for genuine, human voices.

IMDbPro targets entertainment professionals: 19.99/monthor19.99/month or149.99/year for individuals, $79.99/month for a group plan of up to five members, with a 30-day free trial for new members (as of 2026-09-03). Benefits include claiming and managing your name page (headshots, "Known For" selections, demo reels), contact and representation details, in-development titles not visible on IMDb, and advanced search.

For developers, there is no free public query API. Commercial data is licensed through developer.imdb.com via AWS Data Exchange with daily updates (ratings, title metadata, Meters rankings, box office). A separate set of non-commercial datasets is free to download — seven TSV files (title basics, ratings, crew, episodes, alternative titles, name basics), refreshed daily, restricted to personal and non-commercial use, with no plot summaries, images or reviews included.

Copyright and Content Policy

IMDb's Conditions of Use state that all site content and its compilation are the property of IMDb or its suppliers; users receive a limited license for personal, non-commercial use only; scraping and bulk extraction without written consent are prohibited, and commercial use requires a license. IMDb, STARmeter and MOVIEmeter are registered trademarks. Posting reviews or other content grants IMDb a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual and sublicensable right to use it, and the terms explicitly forbid content created by generative AI. The review guidelines add specifics: English only, 300–10,000 characters, original work, one review per title per user, and spoiler warnings where needed.

Good For

  • Looking up credits, release info and trivia for titles and people — a go-to reference for writing, research or settling "who was in that movie" debates.
  • Viewing decisions: combining the weighted rating, ratings distribution, user reviews and Metascore, and browsing the Top 250 for acclaimed older films.
  • Checking box office performance via Box Office Mojo.
  • Watching trailers and finding where titles are playing or streaming.
  • Industry professionals maintaining their presence and finding contacts via IMDbPro.
  • Researchers analyzing film data with the non-commercial TSV datasets (within the non-commercial terms).

Limitations

  • Opaque ratings with manipulation pressure. The weighting algorithm is undisclosed, IMDb acknowledges organized campaigns to inflate or deflate ratings and deploys countermeasures, yet "review bombing" is still regularly reported. Scores reflect the tastes of IMDb's registered-user base, and IMDb itself cautions they are not "accurate" in any absolute qualitative sense.
  • Hollywood-centric engagement. The database is global, but voting activity skews toward English-language content; non-English titles tend to have thinner vote counts and less complete data (a reasonable inference, flagged as such).
  • Login walls for participation: ratings, reviews, Watchlist and contributions all require an account, and user reviews are accepted in English only.
  • Ads on the free tier, and no Chinese UI; the eight non-English interfaces are partial and partly machine-translated.
  • Restricted programmatic access: scraping is contractually prohibited, the free datasets are limited in scope, and full commercial data requires a paid license.
  • User-contributed data carries errors: despite editorial review, IMDb concedes occasional mistakes are inevitable at this scale, so critical facts deserve cross-checking.
  • Regional availability: per a 2010 TechRadar report, IMDb has been blocked in mainland China; as of 2026-09-03 there is no official indication of that changing, so readers there may need to verify accessibility themselves.

Alternatives

  • Douban (also covered in this directory): a Chinese-language books/film/music database and rating community with a similar entry structure — the more localized option for Chinese readers.
  • Letterboxd (also covered): a social platform built around film diaries and lists, with a livelier community feel and plain all-user average ratings rather than IMDb's opaque weighting.
  • Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (not covered here): aggregate professional critics' scores, a complementary lens to IMDb's user ratings.

References