Introduction

Cinema made its debut in the late 19th century and has become a multibillion-dollar industry, distributed over many different countries, and therefore made subject to distinct cultures and trends. Using the CMU Movie Summary Corpus, a collection of 42.306 movie plot summaries extracted from Wikipedia, aligned with movie and character metadata, we take a trip through time to take a look at these trends and how they have (or have not) differed across the world. We will analyze movies from some of the largest film industries (aka the Big Five) - namely the United States, India, United Kingdom, Japan, and France - from the 1950s to the 2010s.

Our saga happens in 4 installments. In Selecting the data we show what data we explore during this journey. In Diversity analysis of actors we take a look at diversity across industries. We answer the question of how movie durations might differ in How long will I be in the theater. Finally, in A deeper look at movie summaries we use NLP techniques to discover common trends.

So, what are the differences between the largest movie industries and how have they changed over time? Let the movie data story begin!