Full of Themselves: Title Drops in Movies

A silly idea turned into the biggest analyses of title drops in film. A title drop is a moment in a movie when one of the characters says the title of the movie. I was curious how often that would happen and since I had the right skills, I decided to take on that analysis myself.

Supported by the friendly folks at OpenSubtitles.com I got started with a massive dataset of basically all the subtitles they had available. After some filtering, cleaning and mapping to movies where I could also find the metadata on IMDb, I ended up with close to 74,000 movies.

I looked at the dataset from various angles, including decades (yes, title dropping has indeed become more common) and genres (non-fiction genres like biography, music or sport tend more towards the title drop). The full analysis is available as a web-based, interactive article. Analysis happened in Python with Pandas, charts were initially rendered out with plotly.express and then styled in Figma.

Thanks to Alice Thudt the article itself and the charts have a beautiful design and I also have to credit her with the film-fisheye lens animation idea - almost hypnotic to play around with.