Short answers, pulled from the story.
IMDb was founded by Col Needham, an English film enthusiast who worked as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol. He had maintained a personal film database since 1987, and on the 17th of October 1990 he posted Unix shell scripts to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies that allowed users to search the database, marking the official birth of what became IMDb.
Amazon paid $55 million for IMDb and two other companies in April 1998. Jeff Bezos struck the deal with IMDb founder Col Needham and other principal shareholders, folding IMDb into Amazon as a private subsidiary.
The Shawshank Redemption, directed by Frank Darabont and released in 1994, is the highest-rated film on the IMDb Top 250 list and has held that position continuously since 2008.
IMDb permanently removed all message boards on the 20th of February 2017, citing that they were no longer providing a positive experience for the majority of its more than 250 million monthly users. The boards also generated less advertising income than other parts of the site, were costly to maintain due to aging infrastructure, and were vulnerable to trolling.
In January 2017, California enacted state bill AB-1687, which required commercial entertainment employment services to remove subscribers' ages on request, a law widely seen as targeting IMDb. Judge Vince Girdhari Chhabria struck down the statute in February 2018, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed that ruling in June 2020, holding the law was an unconstitutional content-based restriction violating the First Amendment.
As of September 2025, IMDb contained some 25.9 million titles and 14.8 million person records. The database covers films, television series, podcasts, video games, and streaming content, along with cast and crew information, plot summaries, trivia, and ratings.