What happens if you compare the streaming giants’ top movies with their ratings on major movie rating sites? The Bad Movie Index, created by Draken Film, the Swedish streaming service for quality cinema, was created to inspire people to broaden their film taste with what the service believes is the first-ever moving subscription price.
“At Draken Film we put our heart and souls into carefully selecting films that offer something extra to the viewer and broaden their view of what quality film can be,” said Mirja Wester, CEO of Draken Film and Göteborg Film Festival. “By lowering our prices when the Bad Movie Index goes down, we hope that more people will discover and be inspired by our selection. The Bad Movie Index not only shows us what movies people like to watch [but also] how it varies over time. First and foremost, it opens up for a conversation about what quality films really are, and how personal taste can be.”
The Bad Movie Index continuously collects and analyzes viewer data from Draken Film’s home country Sweden. It compares the top 10 films on each streaming service with their ratings on two major movie rating sites. The result is an index that varies over time depending on what’s on the top lists.
As the index fluctuates, so does the monthly membership price of Draken Film’s service. When the index hits its’ lowest levels, Draken Film offers a monthly price of 29 SEK (3.3 USD, 2.9 EUR), but if the index shows that people are streaming highly rated movies, the price rises to 109 SEK/month (12.5 USD, 10.7 EUR) – compared with the regular price of 89 SEK / month (10 USD, 8.8 EUR).
“Draken Film has a thorough process when we select films,” said Jonas Holmberg, artistic director at Göteborg Film Festival. “We strive to offer a broad selection of quality films, many of which you won’t find on traditional streaming sites. Instead, we try to inspire, even challenge our viewers to discover quality films from all over the world, in all genres.”
But have U.S. viewers been streaming more or fewer quality movies during the pandemic? And who has the best taste, the French or the British? In addition to the unusual pricing in Sweden, Draken Film has dug deeper into the data, revealing the truth about movie-watching behaviors also in the U.S., UK, Japan, Brazil, India, Germany, France, Denmark, and Norway.
In general, 2021 so far seems to a better year for move-watching than the data from 2020 tells us. Across all countries, the Bad Movie Index has risen by 2,6 percent, from 6.4 to 6.8.
Across the entire period, Brazil has the lowest Bad Movie Index of all countries (6.43), while India only was slightly better (6.58).
Japan had the highest Bad Movie Index during the entire period (7.03), closely followed by the UK (6.97).
Having time off doesn’t necessarily mean watching better movies. Instead, it seems many countries have their lowest Bad Movie Indexes during Christmas, followed by Easter. For the U.S., weeks 49, 50 and 51 have the lowest index recorded during the period.
The British beat the French when it comes to the Bad Movie Index (6.97 vs 6.80). But on the other hand, the French have both higher maximum and minimum indexes than the Brits.
In general, most countries have a higher Bad Movie Index during 2021 than the recorded weeks 2020. The U.S. index has risen by 3.7 percent and the UK by 2.0 percent. However, they are both far behind Norway, whose Bad Movie Index is 6.4 percent higher than 2020.
But not all countries have a higher Bad Movie Index 2021. Two countries have actually lower index 2021 than 2020: Germany and Japan (-0,4 percent and -0,3 percent).
Bad Movie Index www.badmovieindex.com