If Marion Likes the Same Movies as Ames, Iowa City, Are We All the Same?

My colleagues in Iowa have started charting the popularity of movies by reporting the top movie rentals from Redbox kiosks, which immediately got me wondering: how would Marion's taste differ from, say, Ames?

Would Marion be more into romantic comedies, thrillers or whatever catagory Nick Cage movies fall into?

Acccording to Redbox, a company that owns the red DVD and Blu-Ray vending machines you may have noticed outside the Kum and Go on Seventh Avenue and inside the Walgreens, Marion isn't much different from Ames.

When compared to Ames, only one movie on the top ten popular moviews list in Marion does not make it to the HQ of Iowa State University: The Rum Diaries.

And when compared with the home of the University of Iowa, Iowa City, a town with a more ethnically diverse population and one so known for its culture that it was dubbed a UNESCO City of Literature, is also missing only one item from our top ten list: Dolphin Tale.

All of a sudden neither residents from Marion nor Iowa City nor Ames are looking like selective movie-goers. What happened to Marion's unique culture, history and identity?

Nothing.

Really, it's not our fault. It's the same across the country. The zip code 90210 and 50210, which is, of course, the town of New Virginia, Iowa, only differ by, you guessed it, one movie.

Remember, Redboxes hold relatively new movies and this dosen't account for whether we liked the movies or not. 

After all, we all watched the top two movie of the 1990s, Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, but it doesn't mean we didn't later popularize a fan-made Youtube video of Jar Jar Binks falling hundreds of feet off a waterfall.

This leads us to one conclusion: The most popular DVD rentals may not tell us very much about the culture of the town we live in.

I'd argue it is comforting to know that if we ever met strangers on a vacation to Beverly Hills or New Virginia, we'd have something to talk about.