The Differences Between the Preferences of Chinese and American Movie Audience Are Smaller Than You Think

by CHEN WANG  |  July 28, 2017  |  Documentation

After analyzing 40,810 movies on IMDb and Douban (豆瓣), a popular Chinese social networking service website allowing users to create content related to film and many other kinds of topics, I found 5,459 movies have ratings on both IMDb and Douban, and surprisingly, their ratings on two websites don't really show a distinguishing gap.

Though the distribution of these 5,459 circles is towards the left of the 1:1 line, which means Douban users overall are generous with movie ratings, the majority of the movies are within the light-blue 20%-difference area.

Among these 5,459 movies, 2,345 movies have more than 10,000 ratings on both IMDb and Douban. The best movie is the BBC documentary "Planet Earth Season 2", which has a rating of 9.6 on IMDb and 9.9 on Douban, and the worst is the Korean fantasy movie "Dragon Wars: D-War", 3.6 on IMDb and 4.0 on Douban.

So given the ratings difference is not big, what about popularity? Is there any movie well-known in North America but barely heard of in China?

The answer is, yes, but not many.

All the 30 movies only popular on Douban can be classified into 5 categories, which reflected their presence in East Asia. Ayashiki mono no na (Natsume's Book of Friends 3) is the third season of an anime television series adaption of a Japanese fantasy manga series "Natsume's Book of Friends". In the manga series, Takashi Natsume, the protagonist, has had the ability to see spirits, inheriting the power from his grandmother Reiko Natsume, who bequeathed to her grandson her Book of Friends upon her death, a book containing the names of spirits she had bullied into servitude. Takashi spends his time dissolving the contracts and releasing the various spirits that come to him for help.

The number of movies only well-known in America is much smaller than those only well-known in Asia, and all of them are American movies or TV series.