Template:Infobox film/doc

Infobox film is used to list at-a-glance comparative information about a particular motion picture.

Usage
The infobox may be added by pasting the template as shown below into an article, typically at the top of an article above the lead section.

Parameters
All parameters are optional.

Examples


Image
Ideally, an image of the film's original theatrical release poster should be uploaded and added to the infobox to serve as an identifying image for the article. Poster images can be found at websites such as Internet Movie Poster Awards or Internet Movie Poster Database. If a poster image cannot be found for the film, or if the film did not have a theatrical release, then a cover image of the film's display case (VHS, DVD, etc.) may be used instead. Cover images can be found at commercial websites such as Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. In the absence of an appropriate poster or cover image, a screenshot of the film's title card may also be used. When replacing an existing image, upload the new image over the old image (where possible), and update the relevant details on the image description page. See Wikipedia's non-free content policy to learn about the appropriate use of copyrighted images (such as most poster images) on Wikipedia, and see introduction to uploading images to find instructions for uploading an image.

Once uploaded, place the file name of the image, e.g., FILM TITLE poster.jpg (or a similar description), in the  field of the infobox, but do not include the   part of the file name. The  field only needs to be filled if the width of the image is less than 200 pixels (the default image width used by the infobox); enter the actual width of the image, in pixels, so it is not stretched in the infobox. The  field should describe the image, i.e., identifying it as "Theatrical release poster" or "DVD cover"; repeating the title of the film here is not necessary. Below is an example of how to use the fields:

| name          = FILM TITLE | image         = FILM TITLE poster.jpg | image_size    = 150 | caption       = Theatrical release poster

Credits
Credits in the infobox should not be retrospectively altered to accommodate name changes at a later date. A person should be credited by the name they were using professionally at the time the film was made.

Release dates
The film infobox is too small to reproduce the long lists of release dates provided by sources such as the Internet Movie Database. Release dates should therefore be restricted to the film's earliest release, whether it was at a film festival or a public release, and the release date(s) in the country or countries that produced the film, excluding sneak previews or screenings. Film date should be used for the film's release dates. If other release dates are found to be notable, it may be appropriate to include them in the main body of the article (example).

Release dates for straight-to-video and television films should follow the preceding guideline for home releases and airings, respectively.

Some editors like to use flag icons instead of country names. However, this should be avoided, as flags are less recognizable than country names. See Manual of Style (flags) for a more detailed rationale.

IMDb, Allmovie, and other external links
When this infobox template was first created, in December 2004, one of the parameters created an external link to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Irrespective of the fact that IMDb is not used as a reliable source for verifying content in Wikipedia articles, it still is a resource that many people, including editors and readers of Wikipedia, often turn to.

In more recent years, additional external websites have become increasingly useful resources, including Allmovie, Box Office Mojo, British Film Institute, Metacritic, and Rotten Tomatoes. Also, modern films almost invariably have an official website. As a consequence, new external links were added to and removed from the infobox as consensus changed on the subject.

Discussions about the fate of these links took place in numerous places over some time, with a number of people advocating removal of all external links from the infobox, if not the article as a whole. Others spoke of the value of having at least a link to IMDb in the infobox. Eventually, a far from undisputed consensus arose to remove all external links from the infobox and to move them to the External links section where appropriate in view of the External links guideline.

Important points towards this consensus included fact that the infobox could not include all of the available links and that it would be inappropriate to pick and choose one or a few of those links over others. Suggestions that losing access to the most useful of the available links (typically IMDb) would damage the usefulness of film articles were not found persuasive by many since such links could still be included in the External links section and the table of contents linking to the external links section having all of the useful external links is adjacent the infobox.

External links to resources such as the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Allmovie and any official website are no longer included in this template. Nevertheless, these resources and others may be usefully added to the "External links" section of the article using the following templates:



A link to the official website, if any, may be created manually, or using the template.

Ratings
Like links to IMDb, statements of a film's rating(s) have been excluded from the infobox as consensus has shifted over the years. Mainly, there are simply too many ratings systems in English-speaking countries, let alone the world over. Further, these ratings systems rarely exactly agree, and a film's rating can change drastically over time as different editions of a film are released, and re-released, to theaters, broadcast, cable/satellite/streaming, and home media. Ratings information should be integrated into the film's article.

Country
According to the European Lumiere project, the value of this parameter is seldom found in the primary source (the film) and often involves original research:
 * "defining the nationality of a film is a complex task. There are no widely accepted international or even European definitions of the criteria to be used to determine the country of origin of a film. This is both a legal and a statistical problem. It is enlightening to compare the lists provided by the different national sources that we use: countries involved in a joint production are not always indicated (even when the main coproducer is from another country). Different national records - and the statistics on which they are based - can show the same film as having a whole range of nationalities." (from "Identification of Films in the Lumiere Database". European Audiovisual Observatory. 2006.)

Preceded by/Followed by
The "Preceded by" and "Followed by" parameters were removed on 16 February 2011. (See Template talk:Infobox film/Archive 19)