The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is one of the most-visited websites in theworld and the premier source for information on films. Like Wikipedia, much ofIMDb's information is user contributed. IMDb also allows users to voice theiropinion on the quality of films through voting. We investigate whether there isa connection between this user voting data and certain economic filmcharacteristics. To this end, we perform distribution and correlation analysison a set of films chosen to mitigate effects of bias due to the language andcountry of origin of films. We show that production budget, box office gross,and total number of user votes for films are consistent with double-log normaldistributions for certain time periods. Both total gross and user votes areconsistent with a double-log normal distribution from the late 1980s onward,while for budget, it extends from 1935 to 1979. In addition, we find a strongcorrelation between number of user votes and the economic statistics,particularly budget. Remarkably, we find no evidence for a correlation betweennumber of votes and average user rating. As previous studies have found astrong correlation between production budget and marketing expenses, ourresults suggest that total user votes is an indicator of a film's prominence ornotability, which can be quantified by its promotional costs.
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