Feature that checks and reports if I watch a movie of a series out of order.

Ideas to improve Criticker and new feature requests, as well as announcements about new enhancements.
BadCosmonaut
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Feature that checks and reports if I watch a movie of a series out of order.

Post by BadCosmonaut »

It's happened a few times where I accidentally watched or almost accidentally watched a sequel before watching the original movie of a series. Some series make it obvious that a sequel is a sequel, like how Friday the 13th entries are titled Part 2, Part 3, etc. But what about a series like Tokyo Story (1953)? Tokyo Story is the third movie of a trilogy. Late Spring (1949) and Early Summer (1951) are both earlier entries. Neither the plot nor the title of Tokyo Story makes this information apparent. My PSI for Tokyo Story was higher than the other two, which led to me finding it first (and wanting to watch it before I even knew the others existed).

By watching later entries first, the viewer will most likely have the earlier movies spoiled to some degree. Some people don't care about spoilers, but some do. It's also at least somewhat possible that someone might watch Tokyo Story then never watch the other two for no other reason than the fact that they don't even know the other two exist. They would be missing out on the "full story". Personally I'd prefer to only watch a series from the beginning (with only a few exceptions). With a few thousand movies rated, I wonder if I ever watched a Part 2 without knowing about Part 1. If so, I'd like to know so I can decide if I want to go back and watch the earlier entries, even if they have a low PSI.

On each movie page, I'd like to see a list of all the entries in the series (ordered by chronological release date).

Bonus points if it could also show:
- if the entry is a remake of an earlier title
- a list of remakes from the title
- Same for reboots (is it a reboot? List of later reboots from it?)
- Same for different versions
- Same for spin offs

IMDB discusses what all these mean on this page. I can give examples and explain each if needed. But mainly I'm interested in just a list of all the entries in a series. For example, on the Alien (1979) page, it would have a list with:

Aliens (1986)
Alien 3 (1992)
Alien: Resurrection (1997)

If there was a spin off section it would list Prometheus (2012).

The big question then is where can all this information come from. If it's legal and doesn't break the IMDB rules in any way, the easiest solution would be to scrape the information from IMDB. Each movie page has a "movie connections" section that lists this info plus much more. Example. If this info can't be scraped from IMDB, the only other way I can think of is to let users enter it.

It would be nice if I could check a movie page on criticker before I watch a movie to make sure I'm watching the first in the series, but I can already do that on IMDB if I want to. Why would criticker need to duplicate the effort? It's because of a feature IMDB doesn't have...

The feature I really want would be one that will look at all the movies I've already rated, then give me a list of all the movies I've seen where I haven't seen at least one entry from earlier in the series. For example, if I'm a new user on criticker, I might import my ratings from IMDB that has Tokyo Story rated but not Late Spring or Early Summer. Then the user can bring up a report that lists those 2 movies plus any others that are missing from other series. This would be very helpful to anyone who's seen hundreds if not thousands of old movies, and who isn't sure if they missed a few here and there. Also, to my knowledge, no site on the internet has a feature like this, so this would be yet another reason for people to commit to using criticker for the long run.

Note that for some movies, knowing that there are later entries could itself be a spoiler, so I'd suggest the list of sequels/prequels/etc. on each movie page be hidden by default, with a toggle on each movie page to hide or unhide the list on that page for that session. Then there could also be an option in the user's profile page to always unhide the lists for people who want it like that.

BadCosmonaut
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Re: Feature that checks and reports if I watch a movie of a series out of order.

Post by BadCosmonaut »

Actually, there may be way to avoid stepping on IMDB's toes entirely. Skip the part about listing the series on the movie page. Instead, scrap all that same info from IMDB but don't show any of that info to criticker users. Then just compare that info to a user's ratings to make a list of movies they're missing. Then show the user only the list of movies they're missing and nothing else. Since this is very similar to regenerating full PSI in the sense that large quantities of data are being compared, this could probably be a subscriber perk.

mpowell
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Re: Feature that checks and reports if I watch a movie of a series out of order.

Post by mpowell »

Thanks for the suggestion! We do have an item about somehow marking "sequels" or connected films, and I've added your notes to that.

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