The End of Us

Methodology

Data sources

Every film in the archive is built from three public sources, each credited where its data appears.

  • TMDB (The Movie Database) — the backbone. Provides film titles, overviews, genres, keywords, release dates, runtimes, posters, budget/revenue, and a community-driven vote average (TMDB vote count × vote average). This site is not endorsed or certified by TMDB, but it uses the TMDB API. https://www.themoviedb.org.
  • IMDb Non-Commercial Datasets — audience ratings and cast/crew. We pull title.ratings, title.principals, and name.basics from the IMDb non-commercial data export. This site is not for commercial use. https://developer.imdb.com/non-commercial-datasets/.
  • Letterboxd — indie-community rating signal (where available). Community averages reflect an audience that skews toward cinephile and indie taste. https://letterboxd.com.

How we filter films

We start from a snapshot of 1.4 million film records. We retain rows where:

  • Release year is 2015–2025 and
  • Genre is Comedy, Drama, or Romance and
  • Keywords include at least one of: quarantine, pandemic, covid, coronavirus, lockdown, isolation, breakup, break-up, divorce, long distance, relationship, couple, indie, roommate, apartment.

That rule set produces 347 films in the current archive.

How we join data

TMDB rows include an imdb_id field. We left-join IMDb ratings on imdb_id, and IMDb principals (director + top-billed cast) on the same key. Letterboxd ratings, where available, are joined on (title, release_year) — an imperfect match that we accept for the thematic signal it adds.

How similarity is scored

Each film’s thematic match score against The End of Us is computed as:

score = 100 × (0.4 × Jaccard(genres) + 0.6 × Jaccard(keywords))

Keywords are weighted higher than genres because two films can share a genre and feel nothing alike. A 100% score is reserved for the subject film itself; real matches cluster in the 20–50% range.

How often we refresh

Film metadata is frozen in a weekly sync. The End of Us (2021) is a closed work — its metadata will not change — so the archive is stable by design. If you spot a data error, tell us.