A project by Atikh Rashid, Emmanuel Kofi Quist-Haynes & Andres Prypchan
Film genres emerge within particular production centres but frequently spread beyond their sites of origin through adaptation and reinterpretation. Characterising these patterns at a global scale can provide insights into cultural exchange and the evolution of film industries. We examine the temporal and geographic distribution of three genres with identifiable production hubs—Film Noir, Western, and Martial Arts cinema—across six major film-producing regions: the United States, India, China, Italy, Mexico, and Nigeria.
Using metadata compiled from TMDb, IMDb, Wikipedia, and the Hong Kong Movie Database (HKMDB), we construct decade-level genre production counts and visualise them using logarithmically scaled heatmaps and multichannel RGB composite heatmaps. The composite representation enables simultaneous comparison of three genres, revealing both genre-specific dominance and cross-genre co-occurrence. The visualisations reproduce established historical patterns, including the sustained dominance of Westerns in the United States, their later concentration in Italy during the Spaghetti Western period, and the strong localisation of Martial Arts cinema in China. More broadly, the analysis suggests that genres typically remain concentrated around their centres of origin or develop secondary centres of reinterpretation rather than exhibiting uniform global diffusion.
Data and Methods
Data Sources
The analysis combines metadata from four primary sources: the TMDb API, IMDb downloadable datasets, Wikipedia, and the Hong Kong Movie Database (HKMDB). Together these datasets provide information on film genres, production countries, and release dates. Because no individual source provides complete global coverage, missing or inconsistent records were cross-checked against supplementary references, including the British Film Institute (BFI), the American Film Institute (AFI) Catalogue, the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée (CNC), the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (DFF), the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, and national box-office datasets.
Data Processing
Data were collected through API access, downloadable datasets, and web scraping where appropriate. The combined dataset was cleaned by standardising country names, genre labels, and release dates, resolving missing metadata using supplementary sources, and assigning geographic coordinates to major production centres. Film counts were aggregated by decade to reduce year-to-year variation and facilitate long-term comparisons.
Visualisation
The processed dataset was visualised in Python using Matplotlib and Plotly. Individual heatmaps were generated for Film Noir, Western, and Martial Arts films, with colour intensity representing logarithmically transformed production counts to account for the substantially larger output of Hollywood. These three heatmaps were subsequently combined into a multichannel RGB composite. RGB encoding allows simultaneous comparison of three independent variables while preserving their overlap, making temporal co-occurrence immediately visible without requiring multiple figures.
Each colour channel represents one genre: red denotes Martial Arts, green denotes Film Noir, and blue denotes Westerns. Composite colours indicate genre co-occurrence, with yellow representing Martial Arts and Film Noir, magenta representing Martial Arts and Westerns, cyan representing Film Noir and Westerns, and white indicating the simultaneous presence of all three genres. Dark colours correspond to low or zero production. Colour intensity is proportional to the logarithmically transformed film count for each genre, country, and decade.
Findings
The composite heatmap reproduces several well-established historical patterns while revealing differences in the geographic trajectories of individual genres.
Westerns remain consistently dominant in the United States throughout the study period. A second period of high production appears in Italy between the 1950s and 1970s, corresponding to the rise of the Spaghetti Western, demonstrating that some genres develop important secondary production centres rather than remaining confined to their origins.
Film Noir is strongly concentrated in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s before declining substantially in subsequent decades. Production increases later in countries including India and China, although at considerably lower levels than those observed in the United States, suggesting adaptation rather than displacement of the genre’s original production centre.
Martial Arts cinema exhibits its strongest concentration in China. During the 1980s, China also shows substantial Film Noir production, producing a yellow (red + green) region in the composite heatmap that indicates simultaneous activity in both genres. Similarly, cyan regions observed in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s indicate the concurrent production of Film Noir and Western films.
Overall, the visualisations suggest that film genres rarely diffuse uniformly across production centres. Instead, they tend either to remain concentrated around their historical origins or to establish a limited number of secondary centres characterised by local reinterpretation. The relative scarcity of white regions in the composite heatmap indicates that sustained, high-volume co-production across all three genres is uncommon.
