AMC vs. TCM

Those of you who know me know that I look down on AMC in its current manifestation. The movie choices, the constant repetition of movies, the original television shows (though they are quite good), and the commercials (especially the ones for "male enhancement" products) all demonstrate to me that AMC is no longer the channel of American Movie Classics. To better analyze AMC, I created a scatter plot graph comparing the movie being shown this week on AMC and TCM.



Now, I'm not a mathematician or a statistician, I am fairly certain that when we look at this graph, we're supposed to ask, What does this tell us? So, what does this tell us? Not a whole lot. There are, however, a few things that can be inferred from the graph.

One: TCM is showing a larger selection of movies, 91 (one movie was not placed on the graph because it had no ratings on IMDb), than AMC, 47. The most likely reason for this is the fact that AMC's weekly schedule is cluttered with television shows, repeated movies and television shows, and penile growth commercials. Of course, the repeated movies are the worst as they take up the most scheduling time and keep AMC from supplying additional movies during the week.

Two: TCM's movie selection spans a greater length of time than AMC's, with selections spanning 71 years of cinema, from 1914 to 1982. AMC's, on the other hand, is representative of only 56 years, from 1950 to 2006. Possible reasons for this difference is that TCM can afford a wider diversity of movies. I make this assumption because of the commercial-free nature of TCM's movies, which implies that TCM doesn't need money from advertisers. Additionally, because AMC does run commercials, it will need to run movies that advertisers will want to run commercials during. Generally, these movies will be somewhat newer and/or more action-oriented, at least during the day.

Three: Interestingly, AMC's trendline implies that movie quality goes down the older the movie shown while TCM's trendline implies the opposite. My guess for why this is true is that TCM has a larger share of the rights to older movies, which restricts AMC's abilities to obtain the rights to quality movies from the '80s (I use the word "quality" loosely when describing '80s movies). Of course, as mentioned earlier, AMC's demand for older movies might not be that strong because of advertising. I do think, however, that more than one week's data is needed to see if the trendlines remain consistent.

There are some issues with the scatter plot. Probably the most significant of these is the use of IMDb ratings, which can be unstable and a bit susceptible to manipulation, as last year's ratings battle between fans of The Godfather and The Dark Knight shows. Particularly unstable are movies that don't have a lot of ratings, which is the case with quite a few older movies.