• Richard Johnstone

04 May 2011The Internet Movie Database changed the way we think about films, and now it’s influencing the industry itself, writes Richard Johnstone in Inside Story

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IN OCTOBER last year, Col Needham, the founder and CEO of the Internet Movie Database, helped mark the twentieth anniversary of that extraordinarily influential site – the ninth most popular in the world, according to Urlfan – by issuing a list of his favourite films of the past twenty years. At number one on the list (and second only, Needham notes, to Vertigo as his all-time favourite) sits Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a corporate thief who steals secrets from inside the heads of his dreaming victims. The film is described on IMDb as taking place “in a world where technology exists to enter the human mind,” which serves quite nicely as a summary of the impact of IMDb itself on the way people make, watch and think about movies. For anyone with an interest in film, the Internet Movie Database has managed, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception, to get inside our heads…

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Photo: Dolores del Rio in I Live for Love, 1935