I’m assuming the Plex Agent scanner is retrieving the Studio information from the Production Company property on The Movie Database, unfortunately the Production Companies are just that. For example Venom (2018) for example shows Matt Tolmach Productions as the Studio in Plex, except Matt Tolmach was a producer for the movie and he just so happens to be involved via his own company called Matt Tolmach Productions. He is contractor for hire.
Just to highlight the issue with incorrect data Avi Arad and Amy Pascal were also employed as producers alongside Matt Tolmach for the movie in question.
None of the those three were the production studio. The studio for Venom (2018) is Sony Pictures. The Movie Database does not have this information because it is a community driven site without employees to fact check the information (I didn’t see a way that they could even specify a studio). iMDB however knows this and correctly distinguishes between a producer and a production studio.
Is there a way to allow the new Plex Agent to retrieve the correct info?
I have about 1,000 movies in my collection and barely 150 of them can be identified as belonging to the ‘Big Six’. In reality about 800 of those movies are made by the ‘Big Six’. Instead I have hundreds of “Studios” where in reality the vast majority are just contractors to help with a small part of the movie.
I am nigh on certain that everybody’s library is a mess like this. TMDB told me today that they only reason a service will show just one production company per title is due to the service being coded that way, surely something can be done for the metadata to be retrieved in it’s entirety.
Supposing you cannot change the source of the metadata, then even keeping those contractors would be kind of acceptable so long as the correct studio is also retrieved. This sort of data is exactly what Smart Playlists was built for, let us build complete smart collections for stuff like this:
Columbia Pictures
Warner Bros
Disney Pictures
Paramount
Universal
This is currently impossible if the Studio field is being restricted to just one entry per movie and the first in the queue at that, where it is entirely plausible a contractor will go into TMDB and deliberately elevate their company so services like yours will list it as the studio responsible for creating the movie.
On the other end I’m sure Robert Wise would be flattered to see everyone still remembers him for The Sound of Music but he would likely be the first to say he directed the movie, his production company Robert Wise Productions wasn’t created until 20 years after that movie hit the cinemas. Yet Plex Media Server insists 20th Century Fox was not the studio responsible and gives the impression Robert Wise Productions time travelled into the past.
Understandably the two movies I have highlighted are due to bad data, but what use is the Studio information in Plex if it is set up to only keep bad data and discard the good data? It is surely better to collect all of the data and someday somebody will remove the entries that do not belong, at least then we can start organising our libraries properly. This is why the metadata refresh function even exists, right?
Just to throw it in there… The Donner’s Company did not make X-Men: Apocalypse, X-Men: Dark Phoenix and X-Men: The Last Stand. They’ll be annoyed if everyone ends up blaming them for killing off that universe.
