How To Use Web Scraping For Movie Review Sentiment Analysis
Growing up, there was nothing simultaneously relaxing and invigorating like going to the movies. Being part of a crowd engaging in watching something in communal silence always fit my introverted tendencies perfectly by giving me the ability to be in my head and share an experience with another. Then after, you and your friend get to spend hours taking the film apart piece by piece over coffee. But before you get to this point, you first have to decide what film to see.
With the amount of film reviews posted online today, it can be hard to parse through opinions and get a clear sense of a film. Sites like IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes aggregate reviews that tend to focus on the most extreme opinions. By engaging in movie review sentiment analysis, you can break down the nuanced emotions present in film reviews in order to get a better sense of whether it was overall liked or disliked. Adding web scraping tools and techniques to this process makes it accessible to even the most casual of fans.
If you already know the basics of movie review sentiment analysis, then use the table of contents to discover how web scraping can make this process even easier.
Table of Contents
What Is Movie Review Sentiment Analysis?
While sites like Rotten Tomatoes come up with simple good or bad ratings for films, every real film lover knows the truth is much more complicated. As someone who often writes film reviews and criticism myself, I know how important it is to ask questions and criticize even the most incredible of work. With movie review sentiment analysis, the specific language of a review is analyzed in order to create a more nuanced understanding of how positive or negative a review is instead of simply if it is positive or negative. By extracting the feelings coded within certain words, you can get a better sense of a film’s overall rating instead of just the most extreme opinions. Whether involved in the business or simply a fan, this process is crucial to deciding what films are worth your time and money.
What You Learn From Collecting Movie Review Data
Movie reviews are useful for discovering the opinions of critics, but it is also important to the film industry at large when deciding what kinds of films audiences will respond positively to. Check out below for what can be gleaned from movie reviews in addition to just the overall sentiment.
Discover overall trends
When you perform sentiment analysis on one film, your understanding of the film world is still very limited. Once you expand this analysis to other films, you can begin to notice what kinds of films critics tend to like and to dislike. For producers, this is essential to producing the kinds of films that get positive reviews from powerful critics, however many films that find audience success don’t always find critical success and vice versa. For film journalists like me, noticing overall trends in the industry is part of the job. While I mostly review individual films, it is important to situate critique and analysis in the larger context of the film industry at large and what kinds of films are being produced in a certain era. For example, films that don’t rely on big screen impact (special effects, cinematography) are popular right now since theaters are closed and people are watching films at home. Therefore, those in the industry would be looking for the kinds of stories and aesthetics that lend themselves well to the silver screen until theaters and festivals open again.
Compare with other films
Obviously, you can use sentiment analysis to directly compare films to one another when deciding what to see. For viewers, this means getting a nuanced picture of what is playing at the moment so that you can make the best choice to ensure you enjoy your night. However, you can also compare sentiment analysis for a specific director, genre, or actor to get a sense of the critical reception of a particular director’s work and find patterns within a filmography. For example, I wrote part of my college thesis on Francophone filmmaker Agnès Varda. By analysing criticism from different projects at different points in her career, I was able to better understand how critical consensus changed overtime and which types of projects (feature, documentary, short) were the most popular with critics. With this information, I could speak intelligently to the trajectory of her career and think about how critical consensus changed as critics became more welcoming of women filmmakers.
Journalists keep track of competition
For a film journalist like me, one of the worst things you can do is write a review or critique that mirrors another critic’s opinion. Obviously, many critics will agree on certain films yet you want your approach to be unique so that your piece offers something new to readers. Sentiment analysis is perfect for critics because it focuses on the emotional nuances of language. By collecting and understanding this information, you can avoid using the same words and expressions as other critics and find unique ways to write about a film so that your review stands out. Additionally, keeping track of other reviews is a great way to see what kinds of coverage/opinions might be needed. For example, if everyone is raving about a film, then taking a more critical look will help your pitch stand out to editors since it will be separate from the collective consensus.
Scraping Movie Review Data For Sentiment Analysis
Web scraping is the automatic process of extracting data from web pages and organizing it in an easy, shareable format. This process saves time and energy, giving you more time to use the data and learn from it. Below are ways that incorporating web scraping into sentiment analysis can strengthen your work.
No Python necessary
If you search on your own for information about sentiment analysis, you will find lots of information on coding – usually using the Python programming language – that can feel exclusive and confusing. Thankfully, scraping helps you conduct sentiment analysis without Python. By collecting data from web pages and sites that aggregate reviews, you can easily understand the sentiment and keywords of most reviews without doing lots and lots of coding.
Data is available online
Again, the great thing about web scraping is that it uses data already available online. Sites like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Letterboxd already collect tons and tons of reviews from a variety of critics. Tapping into these free resources can help fans and aspiring filmmakers learn from sentiment analysis without having to create ways to collect their own data. This makes analysis accessible and useful to lots of people in a variety of fields. Scraping websites with ticket sale information, box office numbers, and streaming information creates additional data sets for those that can code their own sentiment analysis programs. Read our blog posts of how to compare movies with web scraping.
Discover sentiment trends
As mentioned earlier, discovering trends amongst critics is useful for producers or studio execs when making decisions about what films to produce in the future. When it comes to awards season, producers and other film executives can also use sentiment trends among critics to pick which films to enter for awards. Studios might put out multiple award contender films each year, yet ultimately only pick one or two to focus their marketing budget on. By understanding which films are garnering critical success, they can better predict the minds of awards voters especially for critics awards. Here is an article that demystifies the awards season process for curious fans and filmmakers alike.
How Scraping Robot Can Help You With Movie Review Data Mining
Here are so ways that Scraping Robot’s modules and custom scraping solutions can help you when mining for movie review data.
Create custom scraping solution
While lots of movie data is available to scrape using Scraping Robot’s modules, these modules are ultimately limited. By creating a custom scraping solution with the Scraping Robot team, you can better collect data that suits your specific needs. For example, independent studios might need to track sentiment analysis on a specific set of films and from a specific set of critics. At Scraping Robot, we can help you collect detailed and useful data sets that go beyond the general modules. When you create a custom scraping solution, our team also manages proxies and security, leaving you with more time to be creative and less time focused on hiring developers. If a custom solution sounds right for you and your projects, contact us to get started.
Discover new voices on social media
As a film journalist, I know the best critics are able to build loyal audiences that trust their judgment. However, it is also important to get a variety of perspectives of a film. If you watch a film that features a character from Senegal, finding Senegalese critics’ opinions will be more informative with regards to accuracy than reading the opinion of an American critic. By scraping results on social media for a given film, you can discover critical voices that can’t be found in popular film magazines or websites. When you only follow staff critics at the largest publications, you often miss out on the best and exciting new voices in film journalism.
Search by keywords
Scraping Google results for a given keyword is a great way to do further research into critical opinion on a given writer, director, or genre. For example, if you see an indie film about a ballerina that gets positive reviews, searching for similar films respective reviews can help you get a sense of how that film compares with films telling a similar story. With this information, you can better understand a film within its artistic context instead of simply comparing it to other films playing right now. For film journalists, searching for older, similar films can also be a great way to engage in comparison or understand a filmmaker’s possible references when creating a film.
Conclusion
With many film review sites available, most unfortunately boil nuanced emotions down to positive or negative. Performing movie review sentiment analysis does the same thing except it helps find subtle nuance in language that simplistic systems leave out. By collecting and analysing data in movie reviews, you can learn about film trends at large, make predictions for awards season, and produce films that are sure to catch critics’ attention. Adding web scraping into this process can help even the most casual of fans understand reviews in a deeper way than sites like Rotten Tomatoes allows.
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