The main spoken language is English but all of the production companies are French so the Original Movie Language (OML) is set to French to reflect this. OML =/= spoken language(s).

Wait the original movie language has to do with what language people spoke who were behind the scenes of the production of the movie rather whats being spoken in the movie itself? thats really weird

It makes no sense to duplicate production companies origin info into a field named "original language" for the movie. The production companies are one thing, the original language for a movie is another. If production companies are international, what would be the original language of the movie then ? It makes no sense. The "original language" of the movie, as understood by most people, would be the language of the original audio track for the movie, as in, the one spoken by the actors, in most movies, or the language of the production script for those fully ADR movies where the topic of original language becomes muddy (think Leone's dollar trilogy). That would be closer to what people understand from "original language" and thus would make this field useful instead of a trap (how are we supposed to know this is a reference to where the production companies are from?).

Also, if this field is truly meant to become a reflection of the origin of the production companies, which I guarantee you, 99% of the people contributing to this site didn't know, how are we supposed to know what's the main language of a movie ? Conventional wisdom would say "take the first value from spoken_languages", but here's the output I get, I'm sure you'll see the problem:

title      |       original_language        |     spoken languages    |    correct original language
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) | en | ['it', 'en', 'ru', 'de'] | en
Risky Business (1983) | en | ['de', 'en'] | en
John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) | en | ['ar', 'cn', 'en', 'fr', 'de', 'ja', 'la', 'ru', 'es'] | en
Taxi (1998) | fr | ['pt', 'fr', 'de', 'ko'] | fr
Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002) | fr | ['de', 'fr', 'ar', 'cn', 'la'] | fr
The Mask (1994) | en | ['sv', 'en'] | en
The Long Good Friday (1980) | en | ['fr', 'en'] |  en
GoodFellas (1990) | en | ['it', 'en'] |  en
The Green Mile (1999) | en | ['fr', 'en'] | en

I've just selected a few examples but I have close to 2000 titles that pose this problem from my curated list of 15000 movies. A lot are well known, popular movies. The spoken_language field is not reliable for finding out the original language of a movie, because I suspect a lot of people don't care about the ordering of this because they fill out the original_language field with the proper value. There's also a bunch of cases where people don't even bother with the spoken_language field because, again I suspect they think original_language is enough. Forcing a re-interpretation of the original_language field this late in the game means a bunch of data is wrong.

There are the odd cases where original_language is wrong, but this concerns more obscure, often non-english speaking movies like

title      |       original_language        |     spoken languages    |    correct original language
Taoism Drunkard (1984) | en | ['zh'] | cn

But these are sufficiently rare that correcting them by hand is doable.

@takeshi2010 said:

Also, if this field is truly meant to become a reflection of the origin of the production companies, which I guarantee you, 99% of the people contributing to this site didn't know, how are we supposed to know what's the main language of a movie ? Conventional wisdom would say "take the first value from spoken_languages", but here's the output I get, I'm sure you'll see the problem:

title      |       original_language        |     spoken languages    |    correct original language
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) | en | ['it', 'en', 'ru', 'de'] | en
Risky Business (1983) | en | ['de', 'en'] | en
John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) | en | ['ar', 'cn', 'en', 'fr', 'de', 'ja', 'la', 'ru', 'es'] | en
Taxi (1998) | fr | ['pt', 'fr', 'de', 'ko'] | fr
Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002) | fr | ['de', 'fr', 'ar', 'cn', 'la'] | fr
The Mask (1994) | en | ['sv', 'en'] | en
The Long Good Friday (1980) | en | ['fr', 'en'] |  en
GoodFellas (1990) | en | ['it', 'en'] |  en
The Green Mile (1999) | en | ['fr', 'en'] | en

I've just selected a few examples but I have close to 2000 titles that pose this problem from my curated list of 15000 movies. A lot are well known, popular movies. The spoken_language field is not reliable for finding out the original language of a movie, because I suspect a lot of people don't care about the ordering of this because they fill out the original_language field with the proper value. There's also a bunch of cases where people don't even bother with the spoken_language field because, again I suspect they think original_language is enough. Forcing a re-interpretation of the original_language field this late in the game means a bunch of data is wrong.

There are the odd cases where original_language is wrong, but this concerns more obscure, often non-english speaking movies like

title      |       original_language        |     spoken languages    |    correct original language
Taoism Drunkard (1984) | en | ['zh'] | cn

But these are sufficiently rare that correcting them by hand is doable.

Completely agreed. Another example I can think of is 'Silent movies'. You would put 'nothing' for original spoken language for a silent movie. But instead you would put 'French if its an France film' or 'English if its made in Hollywood'.

Also another example is, I’m from India. We have a bunch of different languages and healthy regional film industries. So if a 'Telugu' language film is made in Northern Indian state of Bihar because of Story reasons, the movie wouldn’t become 'Bihari' language film. This makes zero sense.

@raze464 said:

The main spoken language is English but all of the production companies are French so the Original Movie Language (OML) is set to French to reflect this. OML =/= spoken language(s).

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