Comment on [Meta] Discussion thread for automated posts for new movie releases

Blaze@reddthat.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Hey, so what do you guys think for a format?

  My thought was:

  • Make a thread once a week with upcoming releases that week (maybe highlight ones that are >= 80% on RT in the title)
  • Maybe make a separate thread, like once per day, for ones with >= 80% RT?

  Personally for me, I feel like I would prefer to have separate threads for highly-rated movies; I feel like the generic amalgam of what's-coming-out probably won't be as useful / popular as separate threads for individual good movies that are coming out.

  What do you think?

  @Tenthrow

  source

  • Emperor@feddit.uk ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Sounds great. There’s a slight issue with different dates in different territories (Coppola’s latest hasn’t got US distribution the last time I checked, for example) or films that get released in festivals long before it appears in cinemas.

    Where are you drawing the data from?

    source

    • mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Right now I am just scraping the IMDB and RT public-facing pages -- there is an API for both, but they're both behind some sort of weirdness that I don't feel like dealing with. (Side note when did the internet get so frickin weird? I expected IMDB to be, IDK, open. Hey look -- "Since 1998, it has been owned and operated by IMDb.com, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon" dude fuck the modern internet this is a bunch of crap)

      Anyway

      Be that as it may, I think just to have something that fires up once a week, figures out release schedules and schedules posts for the coming week, and then if something weird happens and it breaks because it's based on HTML parsing crap, then it won't be a huge inconvenience to fix it. That would be my feeling. Unless you know of a better place to grab the data from?

      And yeah different release schedules for different countries is an issue, they're pretty different sometimes and making it just be US-centric doesn't sound like the way. I hadn't really gotten to tackling any of that because I didn't know what to do... but now thinking about it, here's what I think:

      • There's a weekly "upcoming releases" post. A place to start for that could be having a list of everything coming out for the coming week or two for each of a few major regions. So you can skip to your region and see what's going on. Then, for each release, it has a link to the most recent comments thread relating to each movie, and a link to the RT page and what the RT rating is.
      • If there's a movie that's coming out that doesn't yet have a thread discussing it, and it's above a certain score threshold on RT, then it makes one. That way there's always some kind of thread that it can link back to.

      Side note, apparently RT is saying there's a "Run Lola Run" theatrical re-release coming soon, but the current design wouldn't post it, because it's not listed on IMDB with a release date. I wasn't planning on addressing that for any kind of first cut but if that kind of thing happens often it might be worth addressing in some fashion; that's honestly more interesting to me than most of the actual new releases this month.

      LMK your thinking

      source

      • Blaze@reddthat.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Thank you for this comment!

        There’s a weekly “upcoming releases” post. A place to start for that could be having a list of everything coming out for the coming week or two for each of a few major regions. So you can skip to your region and see what’s going on. Then, for each release, it has a link to the most recent comments thread relating to each movie, and a link to the RT page and what the RT rating is.

        I like the idea, but which link would you use in this scenario, to make sure that people can access it whatever their instance? lemmyverse.link?

        source
  • Blaze@reddthat.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    @Emperor@feddit.uk @UKFilmNerd@feddit.uk what do you think?

    source
  • Tenthrow@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This sounds like a great plan to me. I definitely don’t want to make separate threads for films that no one is interested in, so hilighting anticipated films is perfect.

    source
  • Blaze@reddthat.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Good question, I hadn’t been thinking about it. For the moment, I just have a look at /r/movies, usually they have 3 threads about the most popular movies, I usually replicate one or two.

    Separate threads for highly-rated movies probably makes sense, but there is for instance a good example with the latest Bad Boys which has 64% Tomatometer vs 97% audience score: www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bad_boys_ride_or_die

    source

    • mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Interesting... I wasn't planning on dealing with that kind of disparity (because by the time it's released and it has an audience score it's already dropped off the upcoming-releases radar). But maybe if a movie has a high tomatometer and doesn't have a thread yet, it makes one?

      source

      • Blaze@reddthat.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Could be an option!

        source