The value is accuracy about things that change — what is trending this week, what rating a film currently carries, which id belongs to which of three films sharing a title — and the movie id that search returns is what makes the follow-up questions precise. Check what your install actually exposes before planning around the wider list: the repository documents considerably more than the core search, trending and recommendation calls, and it is installed by building from source rather than through npx.
A bridge to The Movie Database API. What a client is handed is a compact set of movie discovery calls, with a resource URI for reading a film's full record as JSON.
- search_movies finds films by title or keywords, returning titles, TMDB ids, ratings and overviews
- get_trending returns what is trending, with the time window set to day or week
- get_recommendations takes a movie id and returns what TMDB recommends alongside it
- tmdb:///movie/<id> exposes a film's full record as a resource — cast, director, reviews and poster URL in JSON
- The repository additionally documents watch-provider lookups, TV and person search, genre and keyword search, and workflow tools such as get_weekend_watchlist and build_franchise_watch_order
A TMDB API key, free from your themoviedb.org account settings, placed in the .env file the repository provides. Installation is from source rather than a package manager: clone the repository, npm install, then npm run install:local writes the Codex and Claude Desktop configuration, after which the client needs a restart.
One command plus a key — npx -y mcp-server-tmdb, then supply credentials