🎬 Predicting Movie Success using Machine Learning

Predicting movie success using OMDb API metadata, The Numbers box-office scraping, and machine learning pipelines.
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🌟 Overview

This project builds a complete end-to-end machine learning system for predicting worldwide box-office performance using:

• 🎥 OMDb API → Movie metadata
• 💰 The Numbers → Budget & worldwide gross scraping
• 🧹 Data Cleaning + Feature engineering
• 🤖 ML Models → Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Linear Regression
• 📊 Visualizations → Scatter plots, histograms, feature importances
• 🧪 Synthetic fallback dataset for testing
• 🚀 Google Colab support

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🗂 Project Structure

movie-success-project/
│
├── data_raw/               
├── data_clean/             
│
├── src/
│   ├── data_collection.py 
│   ├── boxoffice_scraper.py
│   ├── cleaning.py         
│   ├── modeling.py         
│   └── utils.py
│
├── notebooks/
│   ├── movie_pipeline.ipynb
│   └── EDA.ipynb
│
├── visuals/
│   ├── scatter_budget_vs_worldwide.png
│   ├── hist_worldwide_gross.png
│   └── rf_feature_importances.png
│
├── models/
│   └── best_model.pkl 
│
├── report/
│   └── final_report.md
│
└── README.md

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🚀 Features

🔍 Data Collection

• OMDb API metadata
• Budget + box‑office scraping
• Fuzzy title matching
• Synthetic dataset generator

🧹 Data Cleaning

• Numeric normalization
• Missing value handling
• Genre & cast parsing
• Release decade extraction

🤖 ML Modeling

• Random Forest
• Gradient Boosting
• Linear Regression

Metrics:

• RMSE
• MAE
• R²

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🛠 Installation

git clone https://github.com/alexander-ayer/COS482-Project
pip install -r requirements.txt

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🔑 OMDb API Setup

export OMDB_API_KEY="cdd03cf8"

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📥 Usage

Synthetic data

python src/data_collection.py --generate-synthetic 2000

OMDb fetch

python src/data_collection.py --omdb-key $OMDB_API_KEY --titles-file titles.txt

Scraping budgets

python src/boxoffice_scraper.py

Cleaning

python src/cleaning.py

Training

python src/modeling.py

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📊 Visualizations

• Budget vs Gross
• Gross distribution
• Feature importance

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🧠 Future Work

• TMDB API integration
• NLP analysis of plots
• Deep learning models

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👨‍💻 Author

Vasu Patel & Alex Ayer
Computer Science | DATA Science