IMDb Founder Col Needham Shares His Journey To Simplify Entertainment

Have you ever had a moment where you were watching a movie or a television show and felt like you have seen that actor on another project before, but you just could not put your finger on it? Over the years, many have learned to head directly to IMDb.com to find that answer, fast and easy.

Crediting itself as “the world’s most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content,” IMDb (Internet Movie Database) has had more of an elaborate journey over its 34 years in existence than you probably know of, since becoming the go-to entertainment destination that it is today.

Col Needham is very much “the wizard behind the curtain” with IMDb, being its Founder and CEO. Sitting down with this passionate innovator, I began our conversation wondering how this spark of an idea initially came about.

“I’ve spent my whole life obsessed with film,” Needham said. “First film in the cinema – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when I was five years old. I persuaded my mom to take me to see Jaws when I was eight – showed me the power of film to mess with my head. Fell in love with Star Wars, like all those kids, in 1978, by the time it opened in the UK and I saw it. Then at the same time, by the late 1970s, I had interest in technology. Now the funny thing, these two things are all interconnected because I was always fascinated in science fiction by technology and what it could be or where it might take us.”

Needham went on to say that his early interest led him to get his first home computer in the UK when he was 10. While bringing up the “VHS video revolution” in 1981, he said, “I was seeing film after film after film, and I started to lose track of which films I’ve seen. I’ve always been fascinated by credits, so I would pay attention. I was 14 years old and I would be like, Oh, wait a minute! That director worked with that editor on that film I saw the other week. So, losing track of what I’d seen and what I hadn’t seen, I did the classic film geek thing – I got myself a paper diary.”

Needham recalls then going to his home computer and creating a simple database. He would watch movies on VHS, rewind them, press pause and then type the main credits and the cast into the computer, which he said he initially did just for him and his own curiosity towards film credits. To this day, Needham still clocks the number of movies he has seen throughout his life, which he said at the time of our interview was 15,759 unique movies, stressing that the tally does not include movies that he has watched more than once, including his all-time favorite movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which he says he has watched more than 50 times.

In 1985, Needham remembers getting online for the first time during the early internet days and meeting “some like-minded, credits-obsessed people.”

He added: “On the 17th of October 1990, I published the very first version of the IMDb software onto the public internet and you could download it. We had directors and cast and that was it. Couple of weeks later, someone mailed me and said, ‘Hey, I’m a big fan of writers – wouldn’t it be great if you included writers?’ So, we recruited volunteer experts from around the world who wanted nothing more than to share their passion for film, TV and entertainment with other people. That’s how it got started.”

They went onto get their first website in 1993, which Needham says made them one of the first 100 websites to launch in the world. “By 1995, it was growing like crazy but we were also doing it as a hobby, so we decided to bite bullet – see if we could do it and we incorporated in 1996. We launched IMDb.com in time for the Oscars in 1996. We bought our first web server on a credit card. Two weeks later, I was on the phone to our first potential advertiser. I closed the deal on the phone, paid off the credit card before it was due – thus becoming the world’s first profitable internet company, and away we went!”

From there, Needham quit his day job and made IMDb.com his full-time commitment. Then in January 1998, Needham was able to set a meeting with Jeff Bezos and three months later, IMDb became Amazon.com’s first-ever acquisition.

When speaking about IMDb’s evolution over these past few decades, Needham said, “Originally, back in those early days, we had movies and shows. In the time since then, we’ve expanded to include video games, short films, then onto web series – then onto streaming shows. More recently, podcasts, music videos – so the definition of entertainment has kind of completely transformed in the 30+ years and the boundaries between them all have changed, too.”

Over the years, IMDb has expanded its value into not only assisting the everyday entertainment fan enthusiast, but by also creating a professional platform called IMDb Pro, which allows entertainment creatives in various roles to connect with casting executives and other industry leaders to effectively showcase their resume of work for their peers to easily access.

Needham said of IMDb Pro, “It’s a real honor for us to have become kind of like an essential tool for the entertainment industry. We launched Pro at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002, so this was still very early web. Most things that were done on a subscription basis had a real world physical equivalent. Pro was very early in this set of services that was purely online, and as with everything that we do, it was driven by customer need.”

He added: “I get to attend a lot of film festivals. I’ve had the very good fortune to meet many of my heroes and people within the entertainment industry. They will maybe see the IMDb badge [on me] or it will come up in our conversation and they’ll go, ‘You founded IMDb?’ They’ll reach in their pocket and get their phone and they want to show me, not only is the IMDb app in their row of essential apps, but the IMDb Pro app is in there.”

IMDb’s impact has expanded over time in even supporting the public’s consistent obsession with video streaming. If you have ever watched a movie or a television show on Prime Video, you have likely noticed the X-Ray feature, where if you press pause, “up pops the headshots of everybody in the current scene. If there’s trivia that applies to the current scene, the soundtrack, where it’s shot – that’s the case of anticipating what customers will need. As soon as Jeff [Bezos] did the demo of this – it was launched with the Kindle Fire back in 2011, everybody was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is amazing’ but no amount of focus groups would have ever come up with that idea. It’s thinking ahead and going with trying to let the technology solve a problem the customers didn’t know they had.”

As for the ongoing growth of IMDb today, Needham shared that they added more than four million titles in 2023, making it their best year ever, in terms of title growth within a single year. He went on to specify that not all of the additional titles last year were 2023 projects, stating that the IMDb team are still adding projects like Hungarian silent movies from the 1920s to things out of the fifth Avatar movie into their digital library.

Being the life-long movie fan that he is, I wondered which of the much-anticipated 2024 movie titles is Needham most excited to see in theaters ahead.

Needham said, “I’m quite a big fan of Aliens, so I’m very much personally looking forward to Alien: Romulus, which is going to open at the Edinburgh Film Festival in the UK [in August], so I’m looking forward to going to that. Gladiator II, I think, is pretty high on my list. I love the original – Paul Mescal is such an amazing actor.”

As I began to conclude my conversation with the longtime mastermind behind IMDb, I was curious if Needham’s business model is to just keep things going as they are, or if he and his team plan to make even more enhancements on how IMDb can better benefit entertainment fans and professionals alike, all across the world.

“I know but I can’t tell you,” Needham said with a laugh. “We’re also looking to grow the types of entertainment that we cover. We’re always looking to grow the devices on which IMDb is available. We’re always looking to be able to reach more of our customers in their own languages. So, stay tuned for IMDb covering more things on more devices in more locations in more languages. As I always say, we have spoken at a very exciting time!”