Movies' Content Features Predict the Personalities of Their Fans

Movies are a central form of entertainment and cultural expression, yet little is known about how their content aligns with the psychological traits of their audiences. We investigate this by linking movie characteristics and contents with the Big Five personality measures of social-media users who “liked” them. Our analysis shows that movie content, captured via text keywords, predicts audience personalities beyond genre, demographics, and other attributes like quality and popularity. An online experiment confirms these predictions generalize across new movies, audiences, and preference elicitation methods. We further provide fine-grained mappings between personality and movie features, including quality, popularity, genre, psychological themes (e.g., leisure), and unique concepts (e.g., adultery). Our findings reveal systematic links between personality and movie preferences, showing that people favor content that resonates with their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. This research enables scalable, automated audience psychographic assessment based on content features, offering deeper insights into personality-driven media preferences.