IMDb has recently announced the top 10 Indian films of 2018 on their website and founder Col Needham was in India for the same. He spoke to The Quint about the journey of IMDb from its inception in 1990, India being their second largest username, and his favourite Hindi movies. Col said, “The thing is I have always been very passionate about movies and TV and I had this interest in technology so when as a teenager I started to see so many films I could no longer remember which ones I had seen and which ones I hadn’t. I started to create an electronic database just to track what I had seen, who was in it, who directed it and on what date I saw it just for my own personal use.”
Col then got together with his friends who were film and TV buffs and created the website. Like mentioned earlier, India is now the second largest user base for IMDb and Col attributes that to two things. He said, “First of all, the phone adoption within India has just grown and I think you probably know that better. Then there are cheap data packs, so we have seen a rise in the number of people who are online in India to begin with.”
Speaking of the top Indian films of 2018, Col said that there was a significant regional presence and reflected current consumer preferences. “It’s a wonderful mix within the top 10. We have four regional titles in there. They are stories which have resonated with fans of Indian cinema who are voting on it. So, for example, I saw Raazi with Alia Bhatt and that’s my favourite Indian film of this year,” says Col.
Col has seen over ten-thousand movies and concluded by saying that Lagaan, 3 Idiots and Sholay would be his top Hindi movies.
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