June 17, 2014 2 min read

Netflix Top 50 Covers by Genre (Averaged & Normalized)

In my (apparently) never-ending quest to average all the things, I happened to be surfing around Netflix the other evening looking for something to watch. Then a little light bulb went off!

My previous averaging work:

I had previously blended many different variations of movie posters with varying success, but figured it might be interesting to see mean blends based on Netflix genres (and suggestions for me to watch). So, here are my results across a few different genres:

I found a couple of surprising and interesting things in these results…

For instance, I am not surprised at the prevalence of Teal/Orange in Sci-Fi covers. I was surprised to find that the other genre with such prominent color grading happened to be Comedies (I would have guessed Thrillers or Action).

I had also didn’t think that Romance would look like such a hot mess (there’s a cosmic sign there, I think). I can also sort of make out abstract faces in Thrillers and Action. Horror is relatively tame by comparison!

Title location seems mostly consistent across genres, though there’s a marked preference for top-centered titles in Comedies apparently. You can also see that MST3K must have at least a few titles in my Sci-Fi list (a fact of which I am proud of).

I may finish my work on the movie posters and post them in the future. In the meantime, here is one that I did blending all of the movie posters that the legendary Saul Bass created:

In case your curious, here’s the list of the movies these posters are from:

The Shining (1980)
Such Good Friends (1971)
Bunny Lake is Missing (1968)
In Harm’s Way (1965)
The Cardinal (1963)
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
Advise & Consent (1962)
Bird Man of Alcatraz (1962)
One, Two, Three (1961)
Exodus (1960)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
North by Northwest (1959)
Vertigo (1958)
Love in the Afternoon (1957)
The Man With the Golden Arm (1955)