Image: Clark Boyd

Netflix Originals Movies: An Exploratory Data Analysis

The best, the worst, and the most surprising findings from 584 Netflix movies.

7 min readJun 20, 2021

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  • What’s a Netflix Original? movie

Movies that had their original production commissioned by Netflix. They include documentaries, comedies, one-off specials, and a whole load of regional programming.

  • How many movies are there?

I’ve got 584 in my data set, so let’s say 584. The first went live in December 2014 and the last one I have launched on June 1, 2021.

  • What data have you got, then?

Well I scraped the Wikipedia page, added in viewer ratings from IMDb, then cleaned/formatted that into a dataframe in Python.

All in all, we’ve got:

Title, Genre, Language, IMDb Score, Runtime, and Premiere Date for all 584 Originals.

Question 1: Is Netflix releasing more Originals every year?

That’s an easy one: Yes, clearly.

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Tech/business writer, CEO (Novela), lecturer (Columbia), and data analyst. >500k views on Medium. I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was.