Full Of Themselves: An analysis of title drops in movies by Dominikus Baur & Daniel Goddemeyer

A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they're in. "Full of Themselves" is a large-scale analysis of 73,921 movies from the last 80 years, exploring how often, when, and perhaps even why this happens. Our analysis is presented as a data-driven narrative, accompanied by static and interactive charts, as well as a search engine for our full dataset. We use interactive barcode visualizations, designed to resemble film strips, to make every instance of a title drop in a given movie explorable.

Based on data from OpenSubtitles.com and IMDb, we examine the phenomenon of title drops from various angles. After tackling the question of what should even be considered a title drop, we dive into large-scale statistics (36.5% of movies feature at least one title drop!) and take a closer look at common cases, such as movies named after their protagonists (Barbie, anyone?) and films with a single - likely deliberate - title drop.

We then dig into the data to uncover trends: Has the frequency of title drops increased over the decades? (Indeed, it has!) Do bad movies have more title drops? (They don't.) Are certain genres more prone to title dropping? (Biopics, music films, and sports films definitely are.) Finally, we analyze how the length of a movie title influences its spoken appearance within the film. Visitors can also search through all the movies from our analysis to see for themselves if and where title drops occur.