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.
| airline | id | films | IMDb id |
|---|
| Emirates (ice) | emirates | 2,055 | 93.1% |
| Cathay Pacific | cathay | 1,551 | 91.6% |
| American Airlines | american | 682 | 95.3% |
| British Airways | ba | 658 | 95.1% |
| United Airlines | united | 508 | 96.3% |
| KLM | klm | 474 | 96.6% |
| Lufthansa | lufthansa | 405 | 97.0% |
| Singapore Airlines | singapore | 384 | 94.0% |
| Qantas | qantas | 257 | 87.2% |
| ANA | ana | 233 | 93.1% |
| Japan Airlines | jal | 124 | 88.7% |
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):
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
