The final task for dashboard week involved working with an IMDB dataset. We received seven excel files that covered IMDB ratings, title information, crew, episodes, year of release etc. As I’ve had a hunch that the Western genre has been making a comeback, I decided to prove it by focusing on Western movies for my final dashboard. To do this I created two-line charts to assess the total releases and average IMDB rating by year. As well as a stacked bar chart to compare rating distributions by decade.
Alteryx
Although the data we received was already clean, it was extremely extensive. Covering every movie, TV show, actor, and director dating back to 1894. Resulting in a large dataset that required additional steps in Alteryx for optimisation. I started out by filtering out any titles that were not Western or not classified as a movie. From there it just required joining the other tables and creating a year field to extract the release year.
Findings
It turns out my hunch was right (sort of). There has been a steady, gradual increase in western movies over the past two decades. With a 108% rise in productions from 2010 to 2024. While this is a significant increase, this doesn’t compare to the volume of Western films that were being produced between 1920 and 1970.
Although recent westerns can’t beat the past in quantity, it can in quality. So far, 2025 is the second highest ranked year in terms of average rating. And when compared to previous decades, the 2010s and 2020s have a higher ratio of movies with an IMDB rating of 7 or more.
In Summary
Is Western making a comeback in cinema? In some ways, yes. When compared to the 1990s and 2000s, there’s been a noticeable increase in the number of western movies with a steady growth in releases. But at the pace it is currently growing, it would take another 60 years to reach the genre’s former peak.
