Internet Movie Database.
| Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
A beautiful, radiant Friday night. For you and your friends, it is known by another name – “Horror movie” night. This time though, all of you have run out of horror film suggestions.
What to watch?
Let’s surf the internet.
By Google’s kindness, some fresh titles come up. Yet nobody knows whether those films are good and thrilling enough. Your entire Friday’s toil has been for this moment. The choice is crucial.
Your friend sitting cross-legged on the floor looks at you and asks, “Yo, what are the IMDb scores for them?”
Internet Movie database
The acronym IMDb comfortably finds itself settled in the film universe. A lot of people regard it as a standard of legitimacy, referring to its rating score as well as the website to get an array of information regarding films.
IMDb webpage.
| Photo Credit:
Freepik
As is the name, IMDb is an online database for information on all things related to films, videos, TV shows, podcasts, etc. It also includes ample information regarding various personalities part of the film workspace. Now this is not a unique feature of IMDb. There are many online databases like IMDb which provide these details. What makes IMDb such a household name in the film world is because of how large it is. With our film and video history, one can only imagine the ocean of information that exists.
Containing more than 25 million titles, IMDb is the world’s largest and most comprehensive online database for all things film-related.
IMDb
organises enormous data in a manner such that it is useful for us. It is like a library!
Prestigious IMDb rating
Even if people don’t use the IMDb website, IMDb’s presence pervades through its ratings. Can you even count the number of times you checked the IMDb rating of a movie on Google before proceeding to watch it? Exactly.
IMDb’s rating of a film is the average of the user’s ratings of that film on the website. Since more than 80 million users are part of IMDb, the overall average score is considered as a good guide/starting point for our assessment of that film. An IMDb user can rate a film on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest score. There is no “0”; even a worst movie’s worst score is just 1.
An IMDb user can rate a film on a scale of 1 to 10.
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images/ISTOCKPHOTO
Then again, films aren’t answers to be graded and you can always ignore these ratings. Sometimes the ratings are also misused which do not accurately reflect the quality of the film. For instance, a mere bandwagon hate is all that’s required to completely mess up the ratings. But if at all, you need a fun push to help choose between films, IMDb ratings are your friends.
Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are other popular review aggregator websites for films that provide overall scores for films like IMDb.
Spectator spectrum
IMDb is a platform for those who watch films to come and talk about it. The diverse amount of opinions, interactions, reviews, and analyses provided by the spectators make the database richer as it becomes a place to study perception and larger interpretation of film culture. Whether it be dislike or love, IMDb reveals the flow and exchange of people’s sentiment.
Lists galore!
IMDb also utilises their truckload of data and compiles them to provide Top 10 lists for films and TV shows, list of top celebrities, fan favourites, etc.
For your next horror movie night, you can check out IMDb’s popular horror movies list and see what’s trending in the horror genre!
Some IMDb dataset elements
Poster
Rating
Genre
Cast
Crew
Related information
Parental information
Plot summary
Trivia
Personal biography
Published – January 19, 2026 11:00 am IST
