I recently noticed that import from IMDB is currently picking the USA title as the alternative title instead of the World-wide (English title).
The latter is more widely used by definition. Plus, the world-wide title is more often provided by IMDB pages.
Here is one example where icm picks up the US title (“Once Upon a Time in Corea” … meh) instead of the more widely used “Once Upon a Time”:
Here is a second example where icm picks no aka even though imdb provides it as a world-wide title (Tears):
Hi cobweb. I’ve checked out both film pages on imdb, and the main issue is that neither International: English Title is set to “imdb display title”, and this is the primary reason it’s not picked up by icm.
I’ve submitted edit requests to imdb, so hopefully in a day or two they’ll be able to be displayed if the changes are accepted.
I don’t know for sure how it works, but I think it was explained to me one time that ICM looks for a USA alternate title first, and if there’s nothing there it looks for an International alternate title second (I could be wrong about that), but both need to have the “imdb display title” attribute in order for the system to notice them.
Thank you for providing more context here (and for the imdb updates).
It seems to me it would be preferable to pick first the World-wide (English title) if it exists, and then the USA title as a fallback, regardless of private attributes.
So Nunmul’s World-wide (English title) now has the (imdb display title) attribute but it is still not picked up by ICM.
@Marijn I know that scraping from IMDB has been problematic in recent times but is this the intended behaviour? The world-wide english title would be more neutral and universal. The USA-specific title could serve as a fallback if the world-wide title does not exist.
The aka english title (The Body's Way) was referenced on iCM but after an update it was removed.
On IMDB it is referenced as a world-wide English title.
This means that iCM scraping used to pick up the correct value (world wide title) but not anymore. This is a regression over time.
This still needs to be fixed on iCM side. US-specific attributes shouldn’t take precedence over default or international ones.
Hi cobweb. I’ve submitted a correction to imdb to add the English title as a USA one as well.
I understand your opinion, but I think Marijn will keep the backend pulling from USA only. To me, this makes sense because there isn’t really any world-wide English title that’s used in practice - It’s something imdb created, for whatever reason, that’s taken on some validity as a result, but that’s about it. Most countries will either keep the original-language title, or they’ll translate/come up with a title in their own language. The only “international” English-language titles that exist are usually those from English-speaking countries. Typically, only the US and the UK tend to come up with their “own” English title, with other countries just copying what they’ve gone with (or what the studio decides to name the film in each language).
On the contrary, worldwide english title attribute existed for longer that country-specific attributes and was the preferred attribute until a policy changed 2 years ago:
More context in this thread:
The policy to add more country-specific title attributes intends to display a localised title on IMDB website according to a user’s browser default lang. But we don’t care much about that in ICM side. What we want is the most “universal” English title, as used in festivals around the world typically.
Moreover, US-specific title can exist only after a film is released in the US.
Take this korean movie : Bimileui eondeok (2022) - IMDb
It has a pretty clear and “official” English title, was displayed in festivals in Asia and Europe under that title but ICM ignores that title… On IMDB the film record had original korean title and worldwide english title attributes set from the start.
So the worldwide English title is really much used.
Last but not least: if both attributes (worldwide and US) exists and are different because of some local US naming conflicts then the worldwide attribute is more correct.
TL;DR: if we care about the correctness of movies’ entries, use worldwide english title first and US-specific title as a fallback.
