@marred said:

I'd like to look at stats for profitable movies, i.e., where budget > 0 && revenue > budget. I think I would need to call the paginated /discover endpoint to find a list of movie IDs, and then make individual calls to /movie to get the details of each movie. That seems like it will be a lot of API calls. Also, I notice that page numbers cannot exceed 500 for /discover so I can't get all the movies I want, even if I use filters to get the movie list size down, e.g., by release date and language.

Is there a better way to do this that doesn't require making so many API calls? e.g., is there a way to get the revenue and budget information included in the /discover results so I don't have to make /movie calls? Or is there a way to filter /discover on attributes like budget and revenue so that I don't make API calls for movies that don't have this information defined?

The only Discover filter that might help you is "&sort_by=revenue.desc".
There is no other filter for Revenue and none for Budget.

And related, if a /discover result says there are 1,000 pages, then is it just not possible to get the data for all the movies because of the 500 page number limit?

The total tells you how many pages there are.
In the test I did now it reported

  "total_pages": 41113,
  "total_results": 822249

I think 822,249 is the total number of films in the Database right now.
You can use date filters to access them all by making several API Requests per year or period.
&primary_release_year=
or
&primary_release_date.gte and &primary_release_date.lte
But each Request only allows access to 500 pages and/or 10,000 items.

@ticao2 said: The only Discover filter that might help you is "&sort_by=revenue.desc".

Oh, that's great, thanks! I can construct my query to essentially return the first N highest earning movies. That would work for what I want to do.

You can use date filters to access them all by making several API Requests per year or period.
&primary_release_year=
or
&primary_release_date.gte and &primary_release_date.lte
But each Request only allows access to 500 pages and/or 10,000 items.

Got it. That makes sense, thanks for the suggestion. That helps a lot.