January 9, 2010

Netflix by Zip Code

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What movies are the most popular with your neighbors? Netflix has the answer and the New York Times has the interactive graphic. Here in lovely downtown Irvine, for example, the most rented title of 2009 was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Draw your own conclusions. That was a broadly popular rental, but plenty of movies have strong geographic appeal. Here in Southern California, for example, Religulous, Milk, and Vicky Christina Barcelona were popular among the liberal West LA set, but not so much elsewhere. (The map on the right is for Milk.)

If you live in one of the 12 biggest metro areas, you can play around with maps for your zip code too. Not only is it good clean fun, but surely also something that can inspire plenty of amateur sociology as well as blog posts full of partisan condescension. Latte-sipping lefties didn’t like Paul Blart: Mall Cop! Orange County reactionaries refused to see Frost/Nixon! Nobody liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull! (Which goes to show that at least there’s some justice in the world.) Have fun.

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