IMDb is a great website to find information about movies, including their casts, story lines, and reviews. However, IMDb may not be everyone’s cup of tea. If IMDb doesn’t fulfill your fix for film facts, we have some recommendations on other similar websites you can try out instead. Here are 4 popular alternatives to IMDb:
Top IMDB Alternatives
1. Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is the most popular and well-known IMDb alternative, despite its somewhat off-putting name (which refers to a way to show disapproval for a poor theatre performance). While it does have features similar to IMDb, such as movie and TV news, discussion forums, and an instant messaging system, Rotten Tomatoes specializes in ratings and reviews. Not only does it allow users to rate and review movies and TV shows, but it also collects and averages ratings from hundreds of professional movie and TV critics from around the world. The results are displayed using the site’s signature “Tomatometer”, which rates a movie or TV show as “Rotten” (lower than 60% approval), “Fresh” (60% or higher approval), or “Certified Fresh” (75% or higher approval with a minimum number of reviews, including ones from the most trusted critics worldwide).
2. Movies.com
Movies.com is very similar to IMDb, and is one of its biggest direct competitors. There really isn’t much that IMDb does that Movies.com doesn’t do, at least when it comes to movies: trailers, exclusive production and star news, upcoming theatre or home releases, reviews and ratings, showtimes, and more. With that said, there are at least two noticeable differences between Movies.com and IMDb. The first is that Movies.com focuses exclusively on movies, while IMDb has information on television shows and even some video games. The second is that IMDb only offers support for watching movies through Amazon (its parent company), while Movies.com adds support for watching movies on Netflix or iTunes, or buying theatre tickets through parent company Fandango.
3. Allmovie
AllMovie is as much a movie and TV show discovery portal as it is an information hub. It allows people to find information, ratings, and reviews on movies and television shows, as well as information about screen stars and crew members. It also provides support for buying movie tickets through Fandango, or buying digital copies of movies or TV shows through Amazon or iTunes. In addition, users can rate and review movies themselves, search for films using advanced tools, or even explore films based on genres, moods, themes, and more. Based on what a user rates and reviews, AllMovie will give them recommendations on what they might want to watch next.
4. Letterboxd
Named after the practice of converting widescreen film to a standard-screen format, Letterboxd is a site like IMDb that combines information and ratings/reviews of movies with social networking and cataloguing features. Users can keep a record of films that they’ve watched and when they’ve watched them, and rate and review those films. Users can also organize the films that they’ve watched by adding information tags and grouping them into lists, and follow their friends to see what they’re watching. Letterboxd is free to use, but if you upgrade to a paid subscription ($20 a year), you get additional features like personalized “Year In Review” reports, the ability to import movie lists from spreadsheets or instantly copy them from another person, and even the ability to synchronize your Letterboxd account with your Netflix activity!
Have you used any of these sites like IMDb? Was your experience a comedy or a tragedy? Are there other movie information portals out there that you enjoy using, and think our users would enjoy exploring them as well? We’d like to know, so leave us a comment below, or post a message on our Facebook or Twitter pages!
