Box Office Mojo updated their site today, and with the update a lot of pages and tools have vanished. For example, there used to be a little drop-down dialog box where you could adjust things by ticket price inflation. It's gone now, and it doesn't work on the archived pages on the Internet Archive so I have no way to finish my project on the history of the box office, at least not without a ton of painstaking math. You used to be able to have a movie's daily gross arranged as either a calendar-style view or as a list. Now it's list-style only. Their list of all-time inflation-adjusted had steadily been increased, up to 300 movies as of a couple of years ago. Now it's back to 200. Individual franchises and other lists like genre-based lists used to exist. Now they're behind a pay wall, so fuck you IMDb.
Ostensibly they've updated the site to make it more "mobile friendly." I guess desktop users can go suck a big one. It seems every site that tries to be more "mobile friendly" ends up getting worse for desktop users, plus it makes website design this god-awful minimalist bullshit that plagues any sort of graphic design these days. It's yet another reason why I wish smartphones never existed.
But it also seems like the update was also done to try to push people to pony up the $20/month for IMDb Pro (or $12.50/month if you have $150 to plunk down all at once, which I don't). Here I was the other day talking about how sites like Box Office Mojo gave out all sorts of data for free, but it looks like that may start to go away in the future if they see that this shit works. I really hope IMDb doesn't decide to "pull an NPD" and block access to all data to the general public.
Seriously, fuck monetization. Everybody wants a goddamn subscription these days. Fuck this rent-seeking bullshit. And people wonder why more and more people are rejecting modern capitalism. Companies want to nickle-and-dime the hell out of everyone. Subscriptions. Planned obsolescence. Charging for things that used to be free without adding anything other than a "pay up or fuck off." It's all the same bullshit designed to squeeze as much money as possible out of everyone.
A great resource, now turned to shit because of greed and incompetence. I can't seem to be able to enjoy anything.
Last edited by Shadow1980 - on 23 October 2019