Social Reactions to the Pandemic
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a global health and economic crisis and has had many impacts on daily life. This study investigates the effect of the pandemic on movie viewing preferences in Turkey. Using Google Trends data, it handles trends towards epidemic movies with a quantitative analysis method. Google Trends data is a valuable source of information for examining quarantine's psychological, sociological, and health effects. In this way, it can be determined which media preferences the society, which wants to get rid of the epidemic's concerns, is turning to. In this study, the search was made on IMDb with the keyword “contagion,” and movies with an IMDb rating above 6.0 among the listed pandemic movies were examined as sampling. The interest in epidemic films determined three months before and after the epidemic's start was compared. This study suggests an increase in watching pandemic movies in Turkey in response to the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.