One of the most frustrating things we discovered when we decided to build a website about movies is that finding actual data about movies is surprisingly hard. Release dates shift at the last minute, so calendars are out of date. Marketing budgets are uneven, and studios are notoriously weird about releasing creative assets like posters and trailers, so we had to manually track down these promotional items. And everyone wants to keep their tiny slice of the ticket price, so what data does exist isn't intertwingled very well.

So, one of our main goals in building this site was to make the information that we collect available for free in a comprehensive and useful way. We collect data from a wide variety of sources, both by hand, and through a system of automated feed importing, scraping, and cross-referencing. All of this data is available to developers.

Movie Data as XML

All of the (ever expanding) information from our movie database is available as XML via simple URL-based API. All you have to do to access the XML data is append "/xml" to the movie permalink. For example:

http://hooraymovies.com/movie/the-dark-knight/xml

Currently, this returns an XML document containing the title, release date, summary, official link, poster and trailer for the movie. In addition, we include, where available, links to Netflix, Fandango, IMDB and Metacritic.

This data may be re-used in other applications for free and without any special permission. However a link back to the original HoorayMovies movie page (specified as the permalink in the XML file) must be included in the application near to where the movie data is being used.

Movie Search

What, you don't already know the exact URL of our movie page? That's ok, you can use our handy search engine to find movies by keyword or release status. It'll return the same data, in XML format or as JSON nuggets.

To search movie titles by keyword,

XML: http://hooraymovies.com/xmlsearch?q=hell

JSON: http://hooraymovies.com/jsonsearch?q=hell

To get a list of movies by release status,

XML: http://hooraymovies.com/xmlsearch?tag=in_theatres

JSON: http://hooraymovies.com/jsonsearch?tag=in_theatres

Valid parameters for the tag search are: in_theatres, opens_this_week, and coming_soon.

Release Calendar

We hope to provide as accurate and up-to-date a release calendar as humanely (and computerly) possible. We update data about release dates as often as possible, and pull information from a variety of sources, including directly from Fandango's ticket sale system.

The release calendar is available in several formats:

RSS: http://hooraymovies.com/feeds/movies/rss

iCal: http://hooraymovies.com/feeds/movies/ics

Personalized versions of these feeds are available for members of the site. Learn more about all of the feeds members can use here.

Externally Available API

Email us if you have an interest in integrating your application with HoorayMovies. Our external API is currently under development.