Does thanking too many people in the credits indicate a movie is bad?

Using a dataset of 8,096 movies, I crunched the numbers to discover if generosity in the credits correlates wwhether a movie is any good.

A few years ago, David Wilkinson got in touch to ask for advice on his crowdfunding campaign. One of the topics he wanted to chat about was the ‘cost’ of offering a “Thanks” credit to his backers.

This involves awarding someone who backs the film a credit on the movie under the “With Thanks” section. This name check would appear at the end of the movie and, crucially, on IMDb.

On the face of it, there is no cost to offering an almost infinite number of these as it would just be a case of a longer end credit crawl and IMDb doesn’t charge for listing credits.

However, David brought up an anecdote from his time as a distributor. In conversations with fellow film sales professionals, the topic of ‘how to spot a bad movie’ came up. One participant said that they regard having too many ‘With Thanks’ credits as a red flag. The others agreed and added that the number of producers listed on a movie was similarly useful in spotting a bad film.

These are just the kind of industry beliefs that I love to test, so I set about seeking data to either support or refute the claim.

I gathered data on 8,096 movies released in US cinemas between 2000-19 (this research was initially completed a few years ago, hence the slightly older dataset). I also took note of the number of credited/thanked individuals, their IMDb score (to stand in for audience views) and Metascore (to sample the views of critics).

How thankful is the film industry?

Let’s start by getting a sense of how many films give out ‘Thanks’ credits.

41.4% of movies don’t thank anyone. Well, not this way – we can’t track the number of muffin baskets sent IRL.

Helpfully, the two films which had the largest number of credits in the database illustrate the two types of movies which tend to give out large numbers of credits:

• Crowdfunded movies – The Void (2016) is an IndieGoGo-backed movie, resulting in 375 of their 443 thanks credits coming in the form of “Thanks to our indiegogo supporters“. It’s also possible that some of the other people thanked also contributed to the campaign, with larger donations providing them with one of the 47 “Thanks”, 21 “Special Thanks” and one “Thank you”.

• Complicated movies – Paris, je t’aime (2006) is a portmanteau film, meaning that it is made up of eighteen short segments. The result is that not only does the movie have an abundance of ‘Thanks’ (400 credits) but also heavy on directors (22), writers (32) and producers (26).

Are thankful filmmakers bad filmmakers?

To act as a quick measure of quality we’re going use IMDb score (out of 10) to represent the views of film audiences and Metascore (out of 100) to measure the views of film critics.

As the chart below clearly shows, films with a greater number of ‘Thanks’ credits receive higher scores from audiences than those with no or low thanks.

“Ah…“, I hear you cry, “But what if this is just a reflection of all those thankful people giving the film ten out of ten on IMDb as they like it and/or want to be credited on a high-scoring movie“.

Such a cynical response… which I initially had too.

But we can be sure that this is not the case for two reasons.

Firstly, the number of votes on IMDb vastly outweighs the number of people thanked. Across the whole database, the average movie had 54,391 votes on IMDb, and the movies with 20 or more thanks credits had 68,590 votes. In the latter case, ‘Voters’ outnumber ‘The Thanked’ 89 to 1.

Secondly, film critics agree.

A simple and pleasing result. The industry belief that having more than the average number of people thanked in the credits means the movie is bad is flat-out wrong.

Notes

This is looking at all live-action, fiction feature films which grossed at least $1 at the US box office between 2000 and 2019, inclusive.