Exploring Social Issue Films Through Four Core Thematic Dimensions

Traditional studies on social issue films lack multi-dimensional quantification and visualization analysis, despite the importance of these films’ distribution, market performance, and correlation rules for social issue dissemination. This study examines four types of social issue films (gender equality, poverty alleviation, education equity, and disability rights) from 2015 to 2024, using 1,000 stratified random samples and tools including statistical analysis, TF-IDF text mining, PageRank algorithm, and visualization methods. It depicts genre and annual output trends, compares box office performance, analyzes rating-box office correlations via relevant charts, and constructs an original association matrix (P matrix) by integrating plot similarity and cast collaboration; the matrix is further optimized with a damping factor (α=0.85) to form matrix A. Results show that the four core genres account for 50% of total samples, with education equity films leading in average box office and ratings; the optimized matrix elevates the weights of education equity-gender equality and poverty alleviation-gender equality genre combinations notably. Compared with traditional PageRank, the optimized algorithm boosts core issue films’ influence proportion by 25.0% and recommendation accuracy by 23.5%. This research quantifies genre supply gaps and linkage potential, offering data support for policy guidance, creation support, and precise communication while enriching the quantitative research paradigm for social issue films.