Hi expntly,

When you're editing the release dates, the green check indicates a "primary release date". More about what we consider to be the primary release date can be found here.

The release date that shows for a movie is the primary release date (if one is chosen). If it is not chosen, we grab the earliest date that has been added to a movie.

It may be worth having a 'primary' field in the /movie/{id}/releases method response.

Does the first result in the array represent the primary? e.g.

{ "id": 550, "countries": [ { "iso_3166_1": "US", "certification": "R", "release_date": "1999-10-15" }, { "iso_3166_1": "DE", "certification": "18", "release_date": "1999-11-11" }, { "iso_3166_1": "GB", "certification": "18", "release_date": "1999-11-12" }, { "iso_3166_1": "FR", "certification": "16", "release_date": "1999-11-10" }, { "iso_3166_1": "TR", "certification": "", "release_date": "1999-12-10" }, { "iso_3166_1": "BR", "certification": "feibris", "release_date": "1999-07-12" }, { "iso_3166_1": "FI", "certification": "K-18", "release_date": "1999-11-12" }, { "iso_3166_1": "BG", "certification": "c", "release_date": "2012-08-28" } ] }

Is US the primary in this example because its the first result? If not, how do you determine the primary if there are multiple countries with the same release date set e.g.

{ "id": 550, "countries": [ { "iso_3166_1": "US", "certification": "R", "release_date": "1999-10-15" }, { "iso_3166_1": "DE", "certification": "18", "release_date": "1999-10-15" }, ] }

Hey Damien,

Sorry for the late reply. No, I don't think the first one returned on the API is the "primary". The primary field is not available on the releases method right now. I've created a new ticket for this here and will take a look at it soon.

Thanks Travis.

Would the primary release date be a good signal to tell whether a release date is accurate? E.g. the software I wrote using the API indicates to the user that the movie "American ultra" is going to be released on 2015-01-01, but my searches indicate that there isn't a date yet. Thanks!

Hi expntly,

No, probably not.

In this case, for some reason the user who added American Ultra to our db added what looks like a bogus release date.

OK.

What are my options? I'd rather not have to pulll from other sources in addition to tmdb in order to make my signal more accurate :-)

How about relying on how far in the future the release date is? I'm thinking in this case it wouldn't have helped since that release date is less than a month from now and my threshold would probably have been something like 3 months. But maybe it covers the majority of the cases? Do you kind of have an idea when (how long before) the release date starts being reliable on tmdb?

Thanks again!

Hey guys,

Ticket #434 was just pushed live on the API. You'll have to wait ~6 hours for the cached items to expire but the primary field now available.

Cheers.