🎬 Douban API — China Movie & TV Ratings, Top 250 & Hot Lists (豆瓣)

Track Douban (豆瓣) — China's IMDb-meets-Goodreads, where Chinese audiences rate and review films, TV and books and where a movie's 豆瓣 score makes or breaks its word-of-mouth. Pull hot lists, the Top 250 chart, now-playing and top-rated charts (or keyword-search any title) with ratings, rank, cover art and Douban URLs in clean JSON. It's the canonical source for Chinese consumer taste and IP reception — and you can optionally deliver each run straight to a Notion page.

Optional delivery: Send results to your own Notion database or Supabase table in the same run, via Apify's native MCP connectors — the Actor never sees your credentials. One-click connect: Notion or Supabase. Leave blank to get the dataset as usual.

No login, no Chinese phone number, no Douban API key — list in, clean ranked rows out.

📊 Sample Output

Real titles returned by this actor for category: movie, listType: hot — every row below comes straight from a live run on the Chinese-language Douban hot list:

#	Title (电影)	Rating	Douban ID	Subject URL
1	大濛	8.0	36680492	movie.douban.com/subject/36680492/
2	木挽町复仇记	7.2	37516907	movie.douban.com/subject/37516907/
3	单程夜航	6.8	38407729	movie.douban.com/subject/38407729/
4	我的妈耶	6.6	36217763	movie.douban.com/subject/36217763/
5	世界的主人	9.1	37116612	movie.douban.com/subject/37116612/

Each title also carries a high-resolution cover_image poster URL and the original Chinese title — handy for building content catalogs, recommendation datasets, or IP-licensing trackers.

What you get

Per title, you get a flat, typed record:

• Identity — title (Chinese), original_title, douban_id, douban_url (direct subject page)
• Score — rating (Douban's 10-point score), rating_count where Douban exposes it
• Ranking — rank (position in the requested list), list_type, category
• Metadata — year, genres[], director, author, artist (populated where the endpoint returns them)
• Media — cover_image (high-res poster URL)
• Reference — summary, data_source, scraped_at

Note: Douban's open list endpoints expose the score but not vote counts — rating_count is null for list pulls. Richer metadata (year, genres) is populated on Top 250 / detail-backed lists and keyword query lookups. We never fabricate fields the source doesn't return.

Sample input

{
  "category": "movie",
  "listType": "top250",
  "maxItems": 20,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
  }
}

More examples:

{ "category": "movie", "listType": "hot", "maxItems": 12 }

{ "category": "tv", "listType": "now-playing", "maxItems": 40 }

{ "category": "movie", "query": "流浪地球", "maxItems": 20 }

📊 Sample Output (JSON)

{
  "title": "肖申克的救赎",
  "original_title": "肖申克的救赎",
  "rating": 9.7,
  "rating_count": null,
  "rank": 1,
  "douban_url": "https://movie.douban.com/subject/1292052/",
  "cover_image": "https://img3.doubanio.com/view/photo/s_ratio_poster/public/p480747492.jpg",
  "author": null,
  "summary": "1994 / 美国 / 犯罪 剧情"
}

Input

Input	Type	Description
category	enum	movie, tv (full list support) or book, music (keyword query only).
listType	enum	hot, top250, now-playing, new, top-rated (movie/TV; ignored when query is set).
query	string	Optional keyword lookup; overrides listType, works across categories.
maxItems	integer	Hard cap on returned items (1–200).
proxyConfiguration	proxy	RESIDENTIAL strongly recommended (Douban is rate-sensitive).
notionConnector / supabaseConnector	mcpConnector	Optional delivery to your own Notion page or Supabase table.

How it works

Douban is one of the most anti-bot-defended sites in the Chinese web. This actor routes through Apify residential proxy and reads movie/TV lists from Douban's own open search_subjects rated-list endpoint rather than scraping defended HTML. The maxItems cap (1–200) is a hard ceiling. Book and music are supported via keyword query only.

💰 Pricing example

Pay-Per-Event — you only pay for what lands in your dataset:

• Actor start: $0.005
• Per item: $0.05

A 100-title pull = $5.01; a 12-title hot-list check = $0.605. No monthly minimum, no seats.

Use cases

• Brand / IP — gauge Chinese reception of a film, show or franchise before localizing or licensing.
• Consumer research — track Chinese taste and which genres resonate.
• Social listening — use Douban ratings as a word-of-mouth signal for entertainment IP.
• China-watching — build a ratings time-series for the now-playing and hot charts.

❓ FAQ

Is the official Douban API still available? The legacy api.douban.com/v2 is effectively closed; this actor reads open list endpoints with no key.

Can I scrape the Douban Top 250? Yes — listType: "top250" (movies or TV). Hot, now-playing, new and top-rated are also supported.

Does it return vote counts? List endpoints expose the score but not vote counts (rating_count is null).

Can I search for a specific title? Yes — query overrides the list and works across movie/TV/book/music.

Does it require login? No, but Douban is rate-sensitive — a residential proxy is strongly recommended.

🔗 Related actors — China social

• Weibo Hot Search Tracker — the live Weibo 热搜 leaderboard as structured data
• Bilibili Video Search — search and rank Bilibili videos
• China Trends Tracker — trending across China's biggest platforms in one feed
• RedNote (Xiaohongshu) Scraper — China's lifestyle/discovery platform
• Zhihu Q&A Tracker — China's Quora — high-intent discussion and opinion

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