Col Needham Pull Quotes
"One dinner party at the Cannes Film Festival was gift-wrapped for the true movie geek. Naturally, it was thrown by Col Needham, the founder and CEO of the Internet Movie Database, known to the world as IMDb. The event has become a fixture at Cannes, with its fourth dinner this week at a bistro in the city's Old Town. It deserves highlighting in a festival filled with glittering parties, since the IMDb dinner talk was entirely movies. Specifically, each guest was required to answer a bevy of questions about their film memories. ‘It's definitely a dinner for movie lovers. You get to talk about movies and the love of movies, rather than trivial chit-chat,’ said Needham. ‘Because what's more important than the love of movies?’ Needham has thrown these dinners at various film festivals he has attended, including the Sundance Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival. The guests vary from industry professionals, including actors and directors, to various festival organizers. Adrien Brody and director Nicolas Winding Refn have attended the IMDb Cannes dinner in the past (Refn while serving on the 2014 Cannes jury). This year Sundance Film Festival organizers John Cooper and Trevor Groth, critic Chaz Ebert, producer Ron Stein and Magali Simard, programmer of the Toronto Film Festival, attended." – USA Today"Col Needham’s IMDb is one of the most popular websites in the world but he isn’t your typical Weinstein-esque Hollywood power broker. He has a hotline to some of the biggest producers in Hollywood; he knows what films Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio are making before anyone else and Steven Spielberg is his biggest fan. But you won't see Col Needham's name emblazoned on a movie poster, and if you met him, you would barely guess that the bespectacled chap in front of you is one of the most successful men in the history of internet start-ups – as well as in the film industry. Needham, you see, set up what was to become IMDb – the Internet Movie Database. First conceived in 1981, eight years before the birth of the World Wide Web, it went live in 1990, making the site a 25-year-old internet veteran." – The Independent
"Needham is unerringly positive, and when I ask him whether he gets approached for advice on forthcoming projects and casting ideas by those at the top in Hollywood, he's tactful, refusing to divulge his showbiz contacts. One career highlight that he does reveal, however, is the moment that he met Steven Spielberg, of whom he is a life-long fan, at last year's Oscars – and the feeling was mutual. "He grabbed hold of my hand and said 'Oh wow it's such an honour to meet you, I use IMDb all the time. In fact, I've been using the app during the ceremony tonight'. It was such a compliment and such an honour," Needham remembers."
– The Independent
"Twenty-five years ago a Brit armchair cinephile turned his love for cataloguing the films he watched into a database – now it’s one of the most valuable tools in the film industry. Total Film meets unassuming IMDb creator turned Hollywood royalty Col Needham . . . IMDb has become the world’s defacto source of credits, goofs and other trivia, it’s one-click access like finding the Holy Grail for cinephiles hitherto confined to printed guides. In turn, IMDb’s user-generated star ratings overrode critical orthodoxy to create a truly popularist canon where The Shawshank Redemption outperforms critical faves like Vertigo . . . even if the latter, ironically, is Needham’s personal favorite. But he doesn’t mind. ‘I’m a great believer that every film, ever show, has an audience. It’s just a case of making sure that the audience can find the content.’ Criticism [of IMDb] is surprisingly slight, and perhaps the difference is Needham himself. In an increasingly corporate cinema landscape, Needham combines geek affability with an evangelical belief in the magic of movies reminiscent of the Golden Age of studios stars." – Total Film
"Col Needham is IMDb’s brainchild, Founder and CEO. [He is] a technology prodigy whose teenage interest in the movies led him to expand his personal database of films into the Bristol based international venue we now know, with staff members in countries around the world." – PBS's Open Mind
"Cruise, DiCaprio, Travolta ... Needham? Col Needham's IMDb is one of the most popular websites in the world but he isn't your typical Weinstein-esque Hollywood power broker. He has a hotline to some of the biggest producers in Hollywood; he knows what films Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio are making before anyone else and Steven Spielberg is his biggest fan. But you won't see Col Needham's name emblazoned on a movie poster, and if you met him, you would barely guess that the bespectacled chap in front of you is one of the most successful men in the history of internet start-ups – as well as in the film industry." – The Independent
"Thirty years ago, one of Hollywood’s most valued men [Col Needham] was, as successful inventors so often begin, a teen geek.” – Film Journal Magazine Needham was impressed with Jeff Bezos’ vision for his company. 'Jeff had a very clear picture of how IMDb would sit within the Amazon group of companies as a separate brand and separate subsidiary.' Given Amazon’s ample resources, and IMDb’s mounting collection of data, 'it was kind of like a pitch of the proverbial match made in heaven. And I think it kind of turned out that way.’ What the pair has turned out in the ensuing years has revolutionized the entertainment industry as both the nexus of Needham-like fandom and its primary preoccupation, a business. Subscription service IMDb Pro, for instance, is ubiquitously used among showbiz personnel, providing them with individual and company contact information, as well as with news of projects in development, pre-production and production" – Film Journal Magazine
"In 1990, Needham was a shy, Hitchcock-obsessed computer programmer who uploaded his personal movie database on to an internet bulletin board. This became the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb, which is now one of the world’s most popular websites. About 190 million people visit every month to pore over the careers of movie stars and get lost in its welter of information about the entertainment business. In 2013 alone, IMDb added 350,000 movie and TV show titles – the equivalent of 17 editions of Halliwell’s, the old movie encyclopedia. In a quarter of a century, Needham’s teenage catalogue has become Hollywood’s hard drive, and the movie-goer’s answer to the eternal question: Is that the guy who was in that thing?'" – The Financial Times
“As the founder of the world’s biggest film website, Col Needham is the reel deal. His brainchild, IMDb, compiles over 2 million entertainment listings and draws some 160 million visitors a month.” – Air Canada’s In Flight Magazine, EnRoute (October 2013)
“Icon, mentor, deity of Bristol: Founder of IMDb Col Needham. There are few sites that reach iconic status, and fewer still that soar to the heights of The Internet Movie Database, which ranks as the #1 movie website in the world and the 25th most popular site in the United States. IMDb is used to settle arguments, give status to stars and movies, begin comment wars and otherwise serve cinephiles the world over with a dizzying display of details. We can no longer imagine life without it, and would be forgiven for thinking that it was conceptualized by a multinational corporation. But nothing could be further from the truth. Col Needham was a teenager when he began logging details of the films he viewed, pausing and still-forwarding VHS tapes to gather the end credits scrolling when most were busy following the ‘Be Kind, Rewind’ sticker. Fast forward 20-plus years and Needham is featured on The Hollywood Reporter’s 2012 Digital Power list, while The UK Guardian ranked the one-time teen as #46 on their first-ever FILM POWER 100 list, outranking Roger Ebert, Rupert Murdoch and Judd Apatow.” – Beyond Cinema (October 2013)
“Needham is the most powerful Brit in Hollywood – by miles, by millions. He is our Harvey Weinstein. More than that, he's our Mark Zuckerberg, too: the Steve Jobs of south Glos. That's because, 23 years ago, Needham created the Internet Movie Database. He is a living, breathing posterboy for his product: pick apart IMDb's coding and it'd read like Needham DNA. IMDb quickly became the market leader in its field. It still is: when it comes to online film coverage, no one can touch IMDb. The site is now among the 50 most popular websites in the world, with 160 million monthly unique users.” – The UK Guardian (May 12, 2013)
“As the founder and managing director of the Internet Movie Database, Needham might just be the archetype of the telecommuting Web-head. The site that he founded and runs, www.imdb.com, ranks as the 10th most popular entertainment spot online, according to ComScore Media Metrix.” – The New York Times
“Harnessing dual passions for technology -- he started a computer games software business when he was 14 -- and movies, Needham co-founded the Internet Movie Database in 1990 and sold it to Amazon in 1998 for an undisclosed mix of cash and stock. IMDb, the go-to site for information on movies, TV and actors, lists 2 million entertainment titles, attracts 110 million unique visitors globally each month and has a paid-subscriber level. Its mobile app has been downloaded 30 million times. Needham, 44, also oversees the Internet's top box-office reporting site, BoxOfficeMojo, which IMDb purchased in 2008.” – The Hollywood Reporter (2012 Digital Power List)
“Col Needham, founder of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), has watched 8,277 movies since he first started going to the cinema as a lad in Manchester in northern England. The IMDb is the movie buff's bible, stuffed with figures about who played what, when and where, as well as juicy tidbits of what happened behind the scenes. The Amazon-owned site has 160 million visitors, with a highly profitable subscription-only area for professionals.” – GlobalPost.com (May 2013)
“Although Needham himself is now embedded in the film industry, he succeeds because he is cut from the same cloth as his audience. He has seen 8,254 films, a figure he can be certain of as he has rated them all on his own user profile page. These, as well as the talkboards and user-generated lists (Needham's include 10 Roman Empire Movies and his Top 100 Comedies Up To 1960), are not only commercially lucrative, they are what turn a huge data hub into something with a little more spin. IMDb offers not only reams of information but a means of navigating it, too.” – The UK Guardian (May 12, 2013)
“The founder of one of the most successful websites in the world has been unveiled as a self-confessed technology geek. Colin Needham began the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) in 1990 as a hobby, and now the website is the 42nd most popular on the planet.” – The Daily Mail
“[Col Needham, IMDb’s founder and CEO] is one of the most powerful men in the international film industry, a true Internet pioneer. IMDb is one of the world's most successful and popular websites. IMDb has an astonishing 100 million users and its immense popularity is showing no sign of slowing down any time soon. And just as important the site has grown into one of the most important tools in the film industry. Search for any film on the Internet and IMDb will be the first site on the list of results. The website is for film fans and is put together by film fans. Anything you ever wanted to know about movies can be found on IMDb and probably a whole lot more as well.” – The Bristol Evening Post
“IMDb [has] become a sprawling internet monster. Col Needham has overseen IMDb’s massive growth and increasing influence, as an advertising forum, a subscription-charging resource, a ratings guide and now an instant viewing platform.” – The UK Guardian