Films offer a curious lens on society. Aside from what’s depicted on screen reflecting shifting social norms and cultural preoccupations, the changing popularity of different genres over the decades has formed its own intriguing history of the past century—shaped by our viewing habits and the movie studios response to them. 

Such is the story told through graphs created by data visualizer Bo McCready, who used more than a century’s worth of data from IMDb to chart the rise and fall of genres like action, romance and sci-fi between 1910 and 2021. Some of the trends his graphs reveal are easily explained. It’s no surprise, for example, that in the middle of World War II, 13% of films were categorized under “War,” a brief peak in the genre’s popularity. Other trends—such as the precipitous decline in the popularity of the Western since 1950—make sense when you consider how cultural attitudes toward its often racist and jingoistic tropes have shifted.

The graphs do, of course, tell the history of cinema—charting how the Golden Age of Hollywood, marked by its swooningly romantic Technicolor musicals, came to an end around the early 1960s. This was a time when the decline of the studio system made room for realist European movements to reach US shores, and for younger American directors to emerge with a filmmaking language focused on action, rebellion and stylistic invention.

But it is the glimpse the graphs offer of society’s tastes changing through time that makes them so compelling. Over the past two decades, for instance, the documentary form has seen a particularly sharp rise in popularity, now representing a quarter of all films made. Is this a product of an increasingly anxious society seeking what is “real” when traditional Hollywood escapism doesn’t suffice? Perhaps; though in their more formulaic iterations or sensational subjects, such as true crime, documentaries can also make for easy home-viewing fodder—undoubtedly another reason for their growth.