Analysis of IMBb rated sports movies in cinema history


DOI:
https://doi.org/10.70736/jrolss.524Keywords:
IMDb, Movie, SportsAbstract
This study was designed to classify sports films released in the history of cinema according to their IMDb scores. Digital content movie sites were scanned using the document analysis method. The data obtained in the scan were separated according to qualitative and quantitative content. The obtained data were given according to percentage and frequency distribution. In this study, sports films released between 1947-2024 were examined in terms of country, IMDb score, year of release and branch. There are a total of 300 films in the data set, and these films vary in terms of different branches and countries. According to the results of the research, a significant increase is observed in the distribution of films according to year intervals. It has the highest rate with 35.56% between 2013-2024, and it is seen that the popularity of sports-themed films has increased significantly during this period. In the analysis conducted on a country basis, it was seen that the USA was by far the most dominant country with 48.01% of the total films. India ranks second with 7.28%, and Turkey ranks third with 5.63%. Approximately half of the films are from the United States, while the remaining half show a wide geographic diversity. According to this data, boxing stands out as the most dominant theme, accounting for 14.85% of the total films. Football follows closely behind at 14.19%. Basketball comes in third at 7.59%, demonstrating the significant presence of sports in cinema. Overall, this dataset not only reflects the popularity of specific sports but also highlights the rich diversity of athletic endeavors across cultures and disciplines.
References
Baker, A. (2003). Contesting identities: Sports in American film. University of Illinois Press.
Baker, A. (2008). Goal! and the global sports film. Sport in Society, 11(2-3), 253-264.
Baker, A., & Boyd, T. (Eds.). (1997). Out of bounds: Sports, media and the politics of identity. Indiana University Press.
Bordwell, D., Thompson, K. & Smith, J. (2010). Film art: An introduction (Vol. 7). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Brüveris, K. (2017). Sport, cinema and the national imaginary in Dream Team: 1935. Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 8(1), 49-61.
Crosson, S. (2013). Sport and film. Routledge.
Crosson, S. (2020). Sport, film and national culture: An introduction. In Sport, Film and National Culture (pp. 1-17). Routledge.
Curtin, M. (2007). Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV. University of California Press.
Davis, L. R., & Harris, O. (2002). Race and ethnicity in US sports media. In MediaSport (pp. 154-169). Routledge.
Dingenouts, S. (2012). A study on box-office revenue: How user and expert ratings determine movie success. Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Edgington, K., Erskine, T., & Welsh, J. M. (2010). Encyclopedia of Sports Films. Scarecrow Press.
Elsaesser, T. (2005). European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam University Press.
Englert, H. (2018). Hollywood ve spor: Kültürel temsiller ve popüler kültür. Amerikan Kültür Çalışmaları, 24(1), 33-45.
Fodor, P. (2017). Erasing, rewriting, and propaganda in the Hungarian Sports Films of the 1950s. The Hungarian historical review: New series of Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 6(2), 328-354.
Fry, P. (2010). National identity and television sport. Nottingham Trent University.
Ganti, T. (2020). Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Duke University Press
Grano, D. A. (2009). Muhammad Ali versus the “modern athlete”: On voice in mediated sports culture. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 26(3), 191-211.gia
Gronmaier, D. (2022). The US Sports Film: A Genre of American Dream Time (Vol. 11). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
Gül, O., Yurtsızoğlu, Z., & Yıldız, Z. (2024). Spor bilimleri fakültesi öğrencilerinin elektronik spor tüketimine yönelik metaforik yaklaşımları. Spor ve Performans Araştırmaları Dergisi, 15(1), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.17155/omuspd.1420275
Joo, R. M. (2012). Transnational sport: Gender, media, and global Korea. Duke University Press.
Krippendorff, K. (2018). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology. Sage publications.
Lindner, K. (2014). Gender trouble in female sports films. In Routledge handbook of sport, gender and sexuality (pp. 488-496). Routledge.
McDonald, I. (2007). Situating the sport documentary. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 31(3), 208-225.
Melo, V. A. D. (2012). Sharing (modern) experiences: Sport (body)–(image) cinema. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 39(2), 251-266.
Miller, T., Govil, N., McMurria, J., Maxwell, R., & Wang, T. (2019). Global Hollywood 2. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Pearson, D. W., Curtis, R. L., Haney, C. A., & Zhang, J. J. (2003). Sport films: Social dimensions over time, 1930-1995. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 27(2), 145-161.
Pomerance, M. (Ed.). (2006). Cinema and modernity. Rutgers University Press.
Poulton, E., & Roderick, M. (Eds.). (2008). Sport in films. London: Routledge.
Rajadhyaksha, A. (2009). Indian cinema in the time of celluloid: From Bollywood to the emergency. (pp.12). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ransom, A. J. (2014). Bollywood goes to the stadium: Gender, national identity, and sport film in Hindi. Journal of Film and Video, 66(4), 34-49.
Rowe, D. (2019). Time and timelessness in sport film. In Sport in films (pp. 30-42). Routledge.
Schultz, J. (2014). The truth about historical sport films. Journal of Sport History, 41(1), 29-45.
Scott, A. J. (2018). On Hollywood: The place, the industry. Princeton University Press
Shakespeare, T. (2014). Disability rights and wrongs revisited. Routledge.
Shuman, A. (2018). Cultural shifts in martial arts cinema: Bruce Lee and the representation of the Chinese identity. Journal of Asian Cinema, 22(3), 221-234.
Steinke, J. (2005). Cultural representations of gender and science: Portrayals of female scientists and engineers in popular films. Science Communication, 27(1), 27-63.
Sugden, J., & Tomlinson, A. (2007). Stories from planet football and sportsworld: Source relations and collusion in sport journalism. Journalism Practice, 1(1), 44-61
Tapan, A. (2022). Popüler Türk Sinemasında Milli Kimliğin Kolektif Narsisizm ve Aşağılanma Üzerinden Yeniden Üretimi. Selçuk İletişim, 15(1), 360-388.
Wasserman, M., Mukherjee, S., Scott, K., Zeng, X. H. T., Radicchi, F., & Amaral, L. A. N. (2015). Correlations between user voting data, budget, and box office for films in the Internet Movie Database. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(4), 858-868.
Whannel, G. (2019). Winning and losing respect: Narratives of identity in sport films. In Sport in films (pp. 79-92). Routledge.
Zhou, W., & Duan, W. (2016). Do professional reviews affect online user choices through user reviews? Journal of Management Information Systems.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Journal of ROL Sport Sciences

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.