Brain,
In your MySQL table which stores the film data, we could add a field called "counter" or "views". When calling the page you could update the counter. If you think that will be easily integrated with current system, look no further.
Keeping text files for thousands of movies may become problematic over time. The idea of updating the site at the end of the day makes sense, however, how are we holding on to the data? Are you looking at parsing web server logs? If so:
Suggestions:
o keep a mysql table for recording the last date you did an update for.
o use php to go directly to the requested date and start from there.
o The date should be refreshed daily of course.
A lot of the above depends on how the page which displays the movie tag is called. If movies are displayed by a page which looks for query string ids (view_movie.php?m_id=4&sess=xxxx), then you're looking at parsing the logs for that little token.
I think your original idea of a mysql based counter makes the most sense to me.
hth.
