Seatback Cinema: inflight movie picker

Seatback Cinema is a GitHub dataset of the in-flight entertainment (IFE) catalogs of 11 airlines, Emirates ice, United and British Airways among them, with every film matched to IMDb, plus an agent skill that ranks what's on your flight by IMDb and Letterboxd ratings and your own taste. Ask Claude (in the app, or Claude Code), Codex or Cursor "what should I watch on my Emirates flight?" and it answers from the films Emirates is actually showing that month.

Also searched as: seatback-cinema, flightflix, skyflix, planeflix, inflight movie finder, airline movie ranker, mile-high movies, cabin cinema, airline movie list ranked by IMDb.

Airlines

October 2026, from public/data/index.json. "Films" counts each film once, even where the airline lists it once per audio track. "IMDb id" is the share matched with high or medium confidence.

7,331 films in all, 6,862 of them with an IMDb id.

Use it in the Claude app (web and mobile)

Seatback Cinema is a Claude plugin, installed from this repo in one step on claude.ai (paid plans): Customize, Plugins, Add, Add marketplace, and enter len5ky/seatback-cinema; then install Seatback Cinema. It's saved to your account, so the mobile and desktop apps get it too.

The plugin is a skill plus the Seatback Cinema connector. The skill alone is enough: it reads the catalogue and your taste from https://seatback.len5ky.com/api/. Adding the connector from the plugin's Connectors tab (one click, no login) is optional; it lets you paste an IMDb or Letterboxd export into the chat and keeps working when Claude's web fetch is unavailable.

No plugins on your plan? The skill also comes as a zip, https://seatback.len5ky.com/inflight-movie-picker-web.zip: upload it, unopened, at Customize, Skills.

After that, start a chat, on the web or in the mobile app, and say where you're flying. Any of these works:

I'm on Emirates to Dubai on Thursday, about 7 hours. My IMDb ratings are at https://www.imdb.com/user/ur12345678/ratings/. Skip anything I've already seen and pick me three films for the flight, newer ones first.

Flying United to Chicago tomorrow, 9 hours, no idea what's on. Show me what's good and ask me what I've seen.

BA to New York with two kids, 8 and 11. What's on board for them, and one thing for me after they fall asleep?

Is Project Hail Mary on Qantas this month? If not, what's the closest thing?

Claude drops what you've seen and answers with three films and a backup, each with its ratings, a one-line synopsis, why it suits you and an IMDb link. For your taste it asks for a public IMDb profile link first, then a Letterboxd username, then a taste code from last time. With none of those, it lists ten likely picks, twice, and drops the ones you say you've seen.

The taste code. https://seatback.len5ky.com/taste reads your IMDb or Letterboxd export in the browser and gives you a 20-character code; nothing goes through the chat. Paste the sentence it shows ("My Seatback Cinema taste code is ...") and Claude skips everything you've rated. The code holds film ids and your scores, nothing else, for a year. Claude also offers to make one after the first import in a chat.

The IMDb link. Your ratings have to be public (Settings, Privacy on imdb.com). Seatback reads them on its own server, scores and watchlist included, and keeps the import for a day; Letterboxd gives it only your latest 50 diary entries. When a link fails, an IMDb export (CSV, from https://www.imdb.com/list/ratings/export on a computer) or a Letterboxd export (zip) still works, attached to the chat (with the connector) or turned into a code at https://seatback.len5ky.com/taste.

Quick start: the skill

In Claude Code, the same plugin installs with one command and brings the connector with it:

/plugin install seatback-cinema --marketplace len5ky/seatback-cinema

For Codex, Cursor and other agents, or for a Claude Code without network tools, there is a second skill, skill/inflight-movie-picker: a SKILL.md and a dependency-free script that downloads one airline-month from the open dataset and prints it as a table (Bun, Node 22.6+ or Deno). Install it straight from GitHub:

npx skills add len5ky/seatback-cinema          # asks which agent to install it for

Or fetch the folder yourself, no clone needed:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/len5ky/seatback-cinema/archive/refs/heads/main.tar.gz \
  | tar xz -C ~/.codex/skills --strip-components=2 seatback-cinema-main/skill/inflight-movie-picker     # Codex CLI

Start a new session and ask about your flight; the four prompts in the Claude app section above work here too. For Cursor, copy the folder into your project and add a rule that points at its SKILL.md; skill/README.md has the rule file and the Codex fallback for versions that don't load skills.

The skill asks for the airline, flight length, who's watching and the mood, then gives three films and a backup on a long-haul flight, one or two under 110 minutes on a short one, and family titles only when kids are watching. Each pick carries its IMDb link. If you have no export to hand it asks for five films you loved and two you hated.

What a pick looks like

This is the project's own CLI on the October Emirates catalogue, with an IMDb export imported (bun run cli picks --airline emirates --min-year 2025 --top 3):

Emirates 2026-10: top 3 picks (excluded: 58 low-confidence, 94 unmatched, 254 already watched)
taste: 938 ratings (mean 7.3/10), 938 watched, 103 on watchlist; taste.json as overrides

 1. Obsession (2025)  Horror, Thriller  109 min  IMDb 7.8 (414k)  LB 4.1  RT 94%  score 9.46
    A hopeless romantic's wish for true love spirals into a nightmare in this breakout horror hit.
    why: on your watchlist; you rate horror -0.5 (49 films); Curry Barker; English; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37287335/ (high)
 2. Sawt Hind Rajab (2025)  Drama  84 min  IMDb 8.2 (22k)  LB 4.4  RT 100%  score 8.77
    An award-winning true story drama about a young girl's call for help and the race to reach her.
    why: Kaouther Ben Hania; Arabic; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt36943034/ (medium)
 3. I Swear (2025)  Drama, Comedy  120 min  IMDb 8.3 (72k)  LB 4.3  RT 98%  score 8.65
    A BAFTA®-winning biopic of pioneering Tourette syndrome activist John Davidson.
    why: Kirk Jones; English; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31514146/ (high)

The skills present picks in the same card shape. In the Claude app the ratings come from the connector. The coding-agent skill has no scraped ratings, so its numbers come from the model's knowledge of the film and, when TMDB_API_KEY is set, from TMDB.

Add your taste

An export beats any interview: films you've rated drop out, your watchlist floats up, and the model sees what you loved and hated.

• IMDb: sign in at imdb.com, open your name menu (top right), then Your ratings. Click the three-dot menu above the list and choose Export. IMDb builds the CSV and lists it under Your exports, where you download it. Do the same from your Watchlist. Put the files in data/imdb-ratings/ in the folder you start the agent from.
• Letterboxd: letterboxd.com, Settings, the Data tab, Export your data. Unzip the download anywhere and tell the agent where it is.
• No export: give the agent your public profile URL. The script reads it with --imdb-url or --letterboxd-url from your own machine. IMDb often refuses scripted requests, and the script then points you back to the export.

IMDb rows join on the IMDb id, so they never mismatch. Letterboxd exports carry no IMDb id, so those join on title and year, which can miss a retitled film.

Limits

• Not covered: Delta (its public pages show about 80 of roughly 300 films, title and poster only), Turkish (10 highlights behind PerimeterX), Air France (no public catalogue) and Qatar (the catalogue sits behind Akamai and only loads in a real browser).
• Twice a month. The data refreshes on the 1st and 15th. BA, Singapore, Qantas and American only publish the current cycle, so next month's line-up for them appears once it starts.
• One catalogue per airline. Routes, aircraft and cabins differ. Qantas is the large international seatback set; a domestic 737 shows less.
• Medium-confidence matches. About 7% of IMDb ids rest on a single signal, often runtime alone. The skill flags them; check the link before you trust the rating. Regional-language films and concert specials match least often, and unmatched films are left out of rankings rather than guessed.

API

Everything the skill and the connector do is available as plain GET requests at https://seatback.len5ky.com/api/, as JSON with open CORS. Picks come back as the same cards the connector returns. Add pretty=1 to indent the output.

curl 'https://seatback.len5ky.com/api/airlines'
curl 'https://seatback.len5ky.com/api/picks?airline=emirates&flight_minutes=420&min_year=2025&limit=3&pretty=1'
curl 'https://seatback.len5ky.com/api/picks?airline=emirates&imdb=https://www.imdb.com/user/ur12345678/ratings/&limit=3'

/api/catalogue takes airline, genre (comma-separated), min_year, max_year, max_runtime, family, q, limit and offset. /api/picks takes airline, flight_minutes, the same filters, limit, and one of imdb (a profile link or its ur / p.