Is This Movie a Milestone? Identification of the Most Influential Movies in the History of Cinema

The success of a movie is usually measured through its box-office revenue or the opinion of professional critics, but such measures may be influenced by external factors, such as advertisement or trends, and are not able to capture the impact over time of a film. A more efficient measure should account to what extent a given movie has influenced other movies produced after its release, from both the artistic and the economic point of view. Hence, we propose a ranking method for movies based on the network of citations between them, obtained by combining several centrality indexes. We apply our method on a subset of the IMDb citation network consisting of around 65,000 international movies, and we derive a list of films that can be considered milestones in the history of cinema. For each movie we also collect its year of release, genres and countries of production, and we analyze such features for finding trends and patterns in the film industry.