I have seen this before but it just never really registered.

I was doing a review of 'Young Frankenstein' and the review format generator i got off this site seems to just grab the first 4-5 stars listed for a profile.  That is alright IF the profile was correct.

For 'Young Frankenstein' it shows the following as the top 5 stars:
John Madison as Villager
John Dennis (1925) as Orderly in Frankenstein's Class
Rick Norman as Villager
Rolfe Sedan as Train Conductor
Terrence Pushman as Villager

when anyone who as see the movie would know that it was

Gene Wilder as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein
Marty Feldman as Igor
Peter Boyle as the Monster
Teri Garr as Inga
Cloris Leachman as Frau Blücher
Madeline Kahn as Elizabeth

So my question is how can a profile be okayed if the STARS, you know the ones who get paid the big bucks and are listed in the movie credits as the stars, are not in the star position?

Isn't this something that should be better checked?

Another example I quickly found is 'The Manchurian Candidate' (2004).  The profile shows ..

Jeffrey Wright as Al Melvin
Pablo Schreiber as Eddie Ingram
Anthony Mackie as Robert Baker
Dorian Missick as Owens
Jose Pablo Cantillo as Villalobos
Teddy Dunn as Wilson

But I am pretty sure that Denzel Washington (listed 9th) was really the star.

Thanks
Dsig

For DVDProfiler-maindatabase we copy the sorting order as they appear in the endcredits.

In the case of "Young Frankenstein" this is "By Appearance".
Several other sorting possibilities are chosen by the creators of the credits, among these are the most common: "By Importance" and "By Alpha". The only possible sorting order that lists the "Stars" first is "By Importance".

As said above: This is for the maindatabase, locally you can choose any sorting order you like.

The industry had many listing systems. Roughly 50 years ago, Hollywood productions would only list what they considered to be the main cast (for example 20 out of 80 actors, not counting the extras). The current crediting system is not that old, maybe from the 1970s or 1980s, when they began to list all members of an actors union in the credits (leaving out extras, and cameos). We use those "end credits" because on most new productions, they are the most complete credit source, while the studios use an additional main title sequence, that is often sorted by importance. Also note: the "main title" may be near the beginning of a movie ("classic" position in the first quarter) or at the end ("modern" position), just before the actual end credits start.

Now our goal is to have the most complete credits, you can get from the credits in a film. The many changes over the years make it hard to set a rule for that. In current productions, we'll catch all actors in over 99% of the movies, by copying the end credits only. But when we go back in time, we'll find movies where the current end credits are in fact at the beginning of the movie; and we'll find movies where the actors from the main titles are not listed in the end credits (this being the standard in US television productions, with "main titles", "opening credits" and "end credits", with unique actor credits in each section).

The contribution rules have to consider all those forms of credits – Motion Picture system vs Television system, as well as segregated "main titles" to "end credits" vs "main titles" by importance vs complete "end credits".


Bottom line: you'll always find credits of actors, that got into the main titles, but don't appear in the end credits afterwards, even that all principal actors got a second credit in the end credits. It doesn't happen overall too often on motion pictures, but yes, it can happen. On a motion picture it's an odd decision of a studio to list someone in the main titles, but not in the end credits, but I won't support any change of that rule, because that would mess up all Television credits, and I don't want to be required to make a difference between Television credits and Motion Pictures credits.