Why the 50k vote requirement? This basically ensures that only blockbuster films and their directors appear in this chart, with a near complete bias towards large American productions.
Yes, but it does introduce a bias. The Nolan scores illustrate that well. Best not to view this as some objectively the best metric.
It’d be interesting to provide different slices of the voting data to view different biases. Last time I looked at IMDb voting they had demographics too such as age and gender. Along with voting size, it’d be interesting to see different slices and what they like. Older women? Younger women with less than 10,000 votes? Films where older people liked it more than younger and vice versa?
I mean it's just random people giving ratings. So the rating is about how large audience likes it, and a lot of movies are not intended for the large masses so in imdb they get a bad rating because the large mass of generic people didn't like it
It's not random people, it's people interested in cinema. Filmaffinity has a similar approach, but being more used in Latin countries, it doesn't have that US-taste pervading any review. For instance, "Perfect Days" is scored slightly higher than "Hoppeneimer" and much higher than "The Zone Of Interest", and I really agree with that.
Interesting, I use imdb to see if some movies with bad reviews are actually still worth watching. Like I don't really care if there's a bunch of plot holes if the movie is actually fun to watch and imdb is usually more forgiving in that way.
Edit: Clint Eastwood only briefly replaced "Dirty Harry"'s director while the latter was sick.
Edit: I'm not used to seeing the Coen brothers as separate directors, but I don't find any conclusive information on whether they directed "The Man Who Wasn't There" together (but they clearly both worked on it)
Hollywood has a long history of primarily funding films made and mostly starring white men, which gives them the resources to make higher quality films with stars that have more practice resulting in a far better chance of putting out a widely known and higher quality product. That isn't saying anything negative about anyone else, just that when you filter out women and minorities from the directing role and give them fewer and less experienced stars and production crews funded at a lower rate, the odds of being high quality and getting attention is far lower.
Also note how many of the listed films are blockbusters, or at least were highly promoted and widely distributed.
There is something to be said about the number of women and minority directors that have highly rated films with far fewer than 50k ratings total, due to both a smaller output and less public recognition. Their exclusion is a sign of the lack of engagement by the audience, probably for the same systemic issues of racism and misogyny.
It is a self reinforcing system, and calling it out is important but certainly isn't a surprise.
There were only two names I didn't recognize, but I recognized a few of their movies. A few of the ones I recognized have films that I know about, but haven't watched.
It certainly confirms how much impact a director has on the overall quality of a film.
If you only watch one, watch Taxi Driver. It'll make most other films look like community theater. It's dirty, unconventional, expertly crafted and still just as shocking and surprising today as it was almost 50 years ago.