Netflix Originals Movies: An Exploratory Data Analysis
The best, the worst, and the most surprising findings from 584 Netflix movies.
- 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.
Netflix is estimated to have spent over $17 billion in cash on original content in 2020. It will spend at least $26 billion a year on content by 2028, BMO Capital estimates.
2021 has been affected by some major delays but Netflix is still scheduled to release more Originals than it did in 2020.
I’m most excited for Cowboy Bebop, slated for a fall 2021 premiere.
Question 2: For which genres is Netflix creating most original content?
Documentaries, followed by comedy and drama.
But is that split changing each year?
I’ve used a different colour palette here in the hope of making this legible.
