IMDb Movie Scraper

Extract movie and TV show data from IMDb search and chart pages — title, year, rating, vote count, genres, plot, runtime, certificate and poster image. Search by keyword or genre, or point it at a custom IMDb URL.

Heads-up (2026-09-09): IMDb is currently blocking automated requests. IMDb now serves an AWS WAF JavaScript challenge (HTTP 202 with no page body) to every non-browser HTTP client, so this Actor cannot extract title data at the moment. Runs finish cleanly and say so in the run status instead of silently returning an empty dataset. Do not buy this Actor expecting results until this notice is removed.

Use cases

• Build a film or TV metadata catalogue
• Analyse rating and vote distributions by genre or year
• Research titles for acquisition or licensing
• Power a recommendation engine with structured title data
• Track how ratings change after release

Input

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Description
searchQuery	string	No	"action"	Movie or TV show title to search for
listUrl	string	No	—	Direct URL to an IMDb chart or list (e.g., Top 250, Box Office)
genre	string	No	—	Filter by genre (action, comedy, drama, etc.) Allowed: ``, action, adventure, animation, biography, comedy, crime, documentary, drama, family, fantasy, film-noir, history, horror, music, musical, mystery, romance, sci-fi, sport, thriller, war, western.
year	integer	No	—	Filter by release year
type	string	No	—	Filter by content type Allowed: ``, feature, tv_series, tv_movie, tv_episode, short, documentary.
maxResults	integer	No	50	Maximum number of results to scrape

Example input

{
  "searchQuery": "action",
  "maxResults": 50
}

Output

Each dataset item has the following shape (fields vary by mode):

Field	Type
title	string
year	string
rating	number
votes	number
runtime	string
metascore	number

The dataset also ships a preset table view (Movies & TV Shows), so the key columns are readable straight away in Apify Console, and exportable to JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML.

How to run it

In Apify Console — open the Actor, fill in the input form, click Start, then download the results from the Dataset tab.

With the JavaScript client

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('cloud9_ai/imdb-scraper').call({
  "searchQuery": "action",
  "maxResults": 50
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

With the Python client

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient('YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN')

run = client.actor('cloud9_ai/imdb-scraper').call(run_input={
  "searchQuery": "action",
  "maxResults": 50
})

for item in client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).iterate_items():
    print(item)

With the API — POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/cloud9_ai~imdb-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN with the input JSON as the body.

Notes and limits

• No API key, account, or login is needed — just the input above.
• maxResults caps how much a single run collects, which is also what caps the run's cost.
• Requests are paced and failed requests are retried automatically, so runs stay inside the source's rate limits.
• Only publicly available data is collected. How you use the output is your responsibility, including the source's terms of use and any applicable data-protection law.

Support

Found a bug, or need a field that isn't in the output? Open an issue on the Issues tab of this Actor in Apify Console. Issues there are read and answered.

License

Apache-2.0