Today in Movies

About

Have you ever spotted a date mentioned in a movie, or wondered when historical events in movies actually took place? Wouldn't it be cool if you could watch a movie on the same date the events in it occurred?

Maybe you've arrived home after a long day at work, sat down in front of the TV to relax and unwind, and found that you can't choose a movie to watch. With all the streaming options available these days there's so much choice, maybe you just want someone to make the decision for you.

Well, fret no longer. For every day of the year, this website suggests movies that you can watch. What makes this site interesting is that it's not just picking random movies. Each suggestion is in some way connected to the day it's connected to.

Data

Sources

The data has been collected from a variety of sources, including several Wikipedia list pages, the Movie Quotes database, the Movie Timeline website and user collated IMDB lists. Here are some of the URLs that have been used:

Dates

Please be aware when looking at the screenshots of dates that they may be in either US (month/day/year) or European (day/month/year) format. For some dates, with a day beyond the 12th, there's only one format that makes sense, so in those cases working out the correct format is easy. Beyond that, in a lot of cases the date format can be inferred from the country the movie is set in. However, sometimes (especially for some movies made in the US but set elsewhere) the date format may not match the movie's country. In those cases, the correct format can often be inferred from hints found elsewhere in the movie.

Stats

This database contains 1827 events from 1070 movies. These events cover 366 days of the year, and the events occurred in 222 different years. The movies were made in 71 countries, by 1795 different movie studios, have 53 spoken (or signed) languages and were released in 87 different years.

1827Events

1070Movies

366Days of the Year

222Event Years

71Countries

1795Studios

53Languages

87Movie Release Years

History

The idea for this website came about when a friend watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on the First of February, and spotted that the visit to the chocolate factory happens on February the first. When he realised that the next day, February the second, was Groundhog Day, he thought it was a nice coincidence.

When I was told this story a few days later, we both sat there and thought of a few more movies that are related to a particular day of the year. Some of the first movies we came up with were Independence Day, Zulu, Halloween and Die Hard. Of course, it seemed prudent to start adding these movies to a spreadsheet.

As the spreadsheet started growing, I realised that it would be nice to have a website where others could see the list. So I figured I'd try out Gridsome, a nice Vue based static site generator that uses GraphQL as a data layer. I'm a big fan of shiny new JavaScript technologies, and a Vue/GraphQL solution seemed perfect. I've also used Tailwind CSS, a utility-first CSS library, to make things look pretty.

Metrics

Stars

The star rating on this website is based on IMDB and TheMovieDB scores, and takes into account that only very bad movies score below 40% (and not many of those reach below 30%), and very few movies score higher than 80%.

0% - 39%

40% - 49%

50% - 59%

60% - 69%

70% - 79%

80% - 100%

Bechdel Score

The Bechdel score uses the popular Bechdel Test to measure how well represented women are in a movie. The bar for scoring is fairly low, but it's surprising how many movies don't manage to score the full three points. Here's are the three levels of Bechdel scores:

0The movie does not have at least two women in it

1The movie has at least two women in it

2The movie has at least two women in it who talk to each other

3The movie has at least two women in it who talk to each other about something other than a man

Bechdel results are scraped from the Bechdel Test website, so if you want to see a Bechdel score for a movie on this site that's missing one, watch the movie, work out its score and add it to the site's API. When the next build of this website is run, the score will be added.

Value for Money

This custom designed metric is based on a movie score of 1 to 100, and a budget and revenue in dollars, and aims to represent how well the movie did compared to its cost - not just how much money it made, but how much enjoyment it brought to people. The metric was tuned for the movies in this dataset, and kindly created for the site by James Kerr.

The formula used for calculating value for money is:

( score / 100 ) 1.8 / 2.8 x ( revenue / ( budget + revenue ) ) 1 / 2.8

On this site the metric has been turned into a score from 0 to 5, with the following equally spaced ranges:

$$$$$
0% - 16%

$$$$$
17% - 33%

$$$$$
34% - 50%

$$$$$
51% - 66%

$$$$$
67% - 83%

$$$$$
84% - 100%

Technology

This website uses the awesome Gridsome static site generator, which creates the entire site as a set of static HTML pages (along with CSS, JS and JSON files) that are deployed to GitHub Pages. The code used to create the site is available on GitHub.

All data about the events in movies has been lovingly compiled by hand into a Google sheet. The code used to build this website reads from that spreadsheet and downloads a bunch of metadata before running the Gridsome build command to construct the site.

Metadata (images, movie information) is scraped from a variety of sources, including The Movie DB, the Open Movie DB, the Bechdel Test website, IMDB, Wikipedia and WikiData.