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Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings
- raspasov 11y agoRotten tomatoes usually matches my personal tastes pretty well. Their Critics Consensus summaries are pretty blunt and entertaining sometimes. Here's the one for Fantastic Four (2015). "Dull" is my favorite part. "Dull and downbeat, this Fantastic Four proves a woefully misguided attempt to translate a classic comic series without the humor, joy, or colorful thrills that made it great."
- a8da6b0c91d 11y agoThe only way Rotten Tomatoes is useful is if you look only at the negative ratings. All kinds of horrible schlock that has mass appeal gets "certified fresh." But isolating negative reviews: If idiots dislike it then it's probably good; If the negative reviews sound cogent then it's probably bad.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y agoI usually go for a metric along the lines of Chesterton's Fence: do the negative critiques seem like they're dismissing the film out-of-hand, or do they seem to show an understanding what it was going for and still think it failed to do it well? Roger Ebert was usually pretty good about this, which gives his truly scathing reviews that much more bite [1]. [1]: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/battlefield-earth-2000 http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/battlefield-earth-2000 my favorite bit: "The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."
- bmelton 11y agoI generally feel the same, but was woefully misled by a detailed, thorough, but overall negative review of "Spring[1]", which I found to be a delightful genre-bending tale that really surprised me. I'm not suggesting it was the best movie of the year, by any stretch, but where the reviewer kept insisting that the alleged plot holes were completely unexplainable, I found that perhaps she just didn't "Get It", because not only were the holes absent from my viewing, but where she found holes, I found explanations that actually made sense (y'know, within the context of a film anyway). [1] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3395184/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3395184/
- curun1r 11y agoThe problem with Rotten Tomatoes scores is that people want to treat them as a measure of how good a film is...it's a natural tendency considering it's a score on a continuum. But what Rotten Tomatoes scores actually represent are a measure of what percentage of people a film will please enough to give a positive review. Just like the The World's Funniest Joke [1] (which most people find "meh, kinda funny"), a movie can rate very highly on Rotten Tomatoes without rating very highly on anyone's list of movies. But most of the films we'll enjoy are more polarizing. A smaller group of people will really like the film and a sizable group will dislike it. As such, Rotten Tomatoes is a really terrible way to choose a good movie and a really great way to avoid bad ones. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_funniest_joke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_funniest_joke
- onewaystreet 11y agoMovies on Rotten Tomatoes only need to have 60% positive reviews to be "certified fresh." It's a low bar. If you want to find good movies start at the ones over 80%.
- qrendel 11y agoMost of the critic (and user) reviews are what I think of as "easy mode" ones. They don't really teach you anything about the film, just say whether they liked it or not, using the most colorful language they can possibly muster. The FF quote seems like a typical example. Alternatively there are some that really dig deep into the meaning and execution of the film and analyze it in ways I would never think of, not having a PhD in literature or having been to film school or anything. An example I like a bit is Film Crit Hulk[1], which range from simply explaining why the film's execution didn't match its themes (Jurassic World) to borderline philosophical treatises on the meaning of film (Birdman). (Imo, obviously.) For getting a quick rating to see what soared/bombed, stuff like RT and IMDB serves its purpose, but I wish published reviews would do more of the deep dives into film analysis, rather than just letting some random journalist vent their opinion for pageviews. [1] http://birthmoviesdeath.com/author/film.crit.hulk http://birthmoviesdeath.com/author/film.crit.hulk
- cooper12 11y agoThe site you linked is unreadable because they write everything in all-caps. Unfortunate considering that the titles sound interesting and that there's lively discussion in the comments.
- qrendel 11y agoI forgot to mention the part where all Film Crit Hulk reviews are written in the first person as the Incredible Hulk - hence the all-caps. Certainly a valid criticism. Other authors on the site use proper capitalization. I never found it that big a deal, mildly distracting at best, but I can understand where it turns off others. Seems the design decision for gains in immersion(?) caused a larger tradeoff in readability. Some of his posts do recommend convertcase.net at the top, though that requires copy-pasting to a separate tab. They would really be better off enabling it themselves with a script + html button, imo.
- cooper12 11y agoAhh, thanks for the explanation. Probably takes getting used to. The converting website you linked was a big help. Now that I'm actually reading the content there is some great discussion of the topics.
- guelo 11y agoWhat is the deal with IMDB's ratings? It feels like over time all movies end up rated around a 7.
- nathancahill 11y agoThat's what happens when you crowdsource ratings. I like Rotten Tomatoes approach with the critics and audience scores.
- a_bonobo 11y agoI feel that's something like survivor bias - you may watch and rate only the movies you're interested in. My Goodreads ratings are at an average of 3.8/5 because I usually stay away from books I know I wouldn't enjoy.
- Pxtl 11y agoPeople want to rave about movies they like. People want to watch movies that appeal to them. It's not exactly a double-blinded controlled random trial.
- minimaxir 11y agoThis is explained partially by the Four Point Scale. [TVTropes warning] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourPointScale http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourPointScale
- a8da6b0c91d 11y agoThe think to do is find a few reviewers who resonate with you and keep tabs on them. I mostly just see what Armond White tells me to see.
- gkoberger 11y agoReally? He's well-known for picking contrarian views just to get hits, causes problems at events, and is pretty much shunned by the film community. Even Ebert called him a "troll". http://www.ew.com/article/2014/01/13/armond-white-kicked-out-of-ny-critics http://www.ew.com/article/2014/01/13/armond-white-kicked-out... http://www.avclub.com/article/armond-white-claims-he-was-kicked-off-rotten-tomat-65156 http://www.avclub.com/article/armond-white-claims-he-was-kic... http://www.slashfilm.com/armond-white-prevents-toy-story-3-from-becoming-the-best-reviewed-movie-of-all-time/ http://www.slashfilm.com/armond-white-prevents-toy-story-3-f...
- a8da6b0c91d 11y agoEbert was an idiot and an idiot's reviewer.
- cooper12 11y agoIt's interesting that you bring up Ebert because I would apply your original comment to him. Ebert is spot on about the redeeming qualities of many films, but in retrospect he focuses a lot on the positives. I don't think this is due to him appealing to the "idiot masses", but rather it's a product of how he views film. No matter which review I've read, the only impression of Ebert I've had is of someone who loves film and its ability to convey the human spirit. As for calling Ebert himself an idiot the man had seen pretty much every movie that deserves acclaim so it's silly to think he doesn't have a huge library to compare to or isn't qualified to talk about film. He even kept reviewing after having his lower jaw removed because of cancer. The only reason I'd call him an "idiot's reviewer" is because he never bothered with pretentiousness or overanalysis in his reviews.
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- Steko 11y agoNoticed while using Fandango's app that the user scores are basically worthless shill scores often around 1.5 stars higher than they should be. They do give the metacritic rating if you click through or for coming soon though.
- mindcrime 11y agoI've never seen much point in caring about movie ratings. I find very little correlation between my own perception of a movie and the ratings; whether from "professional" critics, or the generic crowd-sourced ones. I just watch stuff that sounds interesting to me. Sure, you hit some stinkers here and there, but I find that acceptable.
- firebones 11y agoSimilarity of reviewers to you, ratings by those people similar. Who cares what the masses think...you care about the people you trust and who have tastes most similar to yours.
- mindcrime 11y agoYeah, I'm just too lazy to put a lot of work into that. The best way I get personalized recommendations (for books, movies, music, whatever) is actually from Amazon.com. They recommend stuff to me based on my purchases, and stuff other people purchased who also purchased what I did. I find that their recommendations (especially for books and music) are usually pretty darn good. The only kink I find, is that the overweight recent stuff, so if I go on there today and buy 3 books on, say, the ketogenic diet, for the next $LONG_TIME, the top few books in my recommendations will be diet related... even though I've purchased 100x more books on, say, computer programming, than diet.
- firebones 11y agoNaw, I'm saying...services should do this for you. Twitter should be working on this instead of Moments. TwitterRecs.
- dopeboy 11y agoThat's interesting - I'm the exact opposite. I figure there's such an enormous amount of content out there and I don't know where to start. So I'll see what's out there and cross their RT & IMDB ratings. If they're both high, I'll check them out.
- intopieces 11y agoI'm wary of any website that offers reviews for things they are also trying to sell, like those online systems for buying games (Playstation Network comes to mind). Why would a profit-driven enterprise allow anything to create a negative impression for the user? Amazon seems okay because they have such a wide variety of items: They're getting paid either way.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- curun1r 11y agoThe problem with most online reviews is that they usually only collect reviews from those who are motivated to submit a review. This usually skews reviews towards the 1 or 5 star ends of the spectrum because 3-star reviewers aren't really motivated to go through the hassle of submitting a review, unless they're the type of person who obsessively reviews everything (think Yelp! Elite). The only real way to get past this is to know when someone is a candidate to review something and solicit reviews from them. Amazon reviews fall into this category and it's the reason why they're pretty reliable. I'd bet they're getting 5-10% conversion (I've worked on systems that got over 30%, but different types of reviewable products have different conversion rates) on every "Did product X meet your expectations?" email they send. They've got their die hards that review everything and who's reviews everyone finds helpful, but the star rating will be largely determined by the larger group of people that write 1-2 sentences and submit. But without closing the loop and attempting to get reviews from every possible reviewer, ratings are far less useful.
- petra 11y agoStill with regards to books,on Amazon alot of books get a relatively high score(4+) and it's hard to filter good vs bad books using the score.
- gedrap 11y agoFair point. But I found Steam reviews aggregation pretty good, or at least matching my taste. If the aggregate says 'Mixed reviews', it's usually pretty bad, and anything below is definitely bad. On the extreme end of the spectrum, I've never been disappointed by a game rated as 'Overwhelmingly positive'. I've made dozens of purchases based on the reviews there and haven't been disappointed yet. I guess they are in a similar position as Amazon (well pointed). It's ok to indicate that the game is probably crap because there are loads of games anyway and chances are that you'll end up buying something else. However, I gave more thought to it... They are actually incentivized to show honest reviews. If you buy a piece crap which was meant to be 'great', you will be disappointed and might not come back. However, if you (thanks to the honest reviews) buy something actually good than you might become a regular customer who will generate much more revenue then all the disappointed and tricked customers would have ever generated.
- platz 11y agoMetacritic
- afterburner 11y agoor look at the average rating in RT
- vidoc 11y agoI'm even more cautious about yelp ratings!
- nathancahill 11y agoA friend of mine suggested what I think is a very good idea for starting to fix the Yelp ratings problem: Rotten Tomatoes style ratings, where you're given both food critics and audience ratings.
- raverbashing 11y agoOr, you know, just read the reviews and see the distribution A review of one star that has 'tis place sux' is much less relevant than one star review that says "ok, service took one hour, even after asking the server multiple times, the food was undercooked and tasteless" Though my favourite Yelp complaint is that the food tastes "bland". I'm pretty sure that 90% of people that complain about this have absolutely no idea what that dish should actually taste like (or maybe is accustomed to commercial MSG pumped dishes)
- kristofferR 11y agoGo watch the latest South Park episode ("You're not Yelping"), it's all about Yelp. http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s19e04-youre-not-yelping http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s19e04-youre-not-yelpi...
- graeme 11y agoI've noticed a trend with IMDB reviews: * The rating will be very high around release time, then drop a point or two after a few weeks * The top 1-2 reviews will be 9-10 star. After that will follow a large number of reviews saying the movie was terrible. I first noticed this with movies that I disliked, and couldn't believe their high imdb rating. For example, I loathed American Hustle, and it had that same pattern. That movie was around 8.4 when first out, and had a ten star review on top. (I've now noticed the ten star review is gone.)
- dublinben 11y agoIt's likely that you just have specific tastes, and you were not the target audience for that movie. It is almost universally liked by critics, earning a 93% on RT and 90% on MC. The high rating on IMDB wasn't misleading in any way.
- graeme 11y agoIt's possible, but then what's going on with the imdb reviews? The users hate it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1800241/reviews?ref_=tt_ov_rt http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1800241/reviews?ref_=tt_ov_rt When I look at older movies (pre 2010 or so) there is no such divergence in rotten tomatoes and imdb user reviews. Recent movies have a massive divergence. I'm not sure what's going on.
- graeme 11y agoIt's possible, but then what's going on with the imdb reviews? The users hate it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1800241/reviews?ref_=tt_ov_rt http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1800241/reviews?ref_=tt_ov_rt When I look at older movies (pre 2010 or so) there is no such divergence in rotten tomatoes and imdb user reviews. Recent movies have a massive divergence. I'm not sure what's going on.
- aaron695 11y ago> The rating will be very high around release time Pretty simple, people see movies they think will suit them early so will rate slightly higher than the rest who see it later / on DVD and rate it less. There's a type of movie that fools critics and American Hustle was one. I think it was great but it was over rated. But it took a while for that to get out. Rarely it goes the other way where movies break genre so the keen people are a little disappointed but the rest are pleasantly surprised and the rating goes up.
- grecy 11y agoAnyone that reads /r/movies semi-regularly would have seen this happening a lot. The posts there are so blatantly advertising it's insulting, though it seems the mods are in on it, they have no interest in changing anything.
- ripberge 11y agoHaving done a little bit of work on stuff like this for Fandango a long time ago I learned a little bit about their view of customers from their marketing folks. Their average customer is a person that sees all the big blockbuster movies. They are not discerning about what they see and they are not critical viewers. Comparing these people's reviews to the professionals on Rotten Tomatoes is a little silly. As mentioned, Fandango has no motive to reduce the ratings, the more "must see" movies there are, the more money they make. edit having read more of this article now, I see the issue with Fandango's rounding. Pretty lame.
- goodness 11y agoThe Fandango scores were also higher than the Rotten Tomatoes user ratings 74% of the time. But yeah, Fandango is obviously incentivized to be biased.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- abruzzi 11y agoI never trust any online reviews, especially aggregate reviews, because I have never found any to hew remotely closely to my taste (the best example is on RT, the worst movie I've seen in the last two decades is rated 95% fresh). The only approach I've found that works is to pick a professional reviewer that is marginally close to my taste, read a lot of their reviews, so I know where I tend to agree and where I disagree with the reviewer, then build a mental translation, so when I would see Roger Ebert trash a David Lynch movie, I could discount it because I know Ebert's antipathy to Lynch in not something I share.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- eridius 11y agoI'm curious, what was the 95% fresh movie that you thought was the worst movie in 2 decades?
- copperx 11y agoI'm going to guess Snowpiercer.
- bmelton 11y agoI'm not the OP, so this is just a guess, but my money's on "The Room". If not, I'm guessing it's because the OP hasn't yet seen it. ;-) http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/room_2015/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/room_2015/ Edit: Ooops. The wrong "The Room" altogether. Nod to abruzzi for the correction. The actual Room is only 35% fresh, which I must say is either way too high, or way too low, depending on one's take of the film. The correct link is here: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/
- abruzzi 11y agoSadly that's the wrong Room: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/
- Sukotto 11y agoI really like the hobby(?) project http://www.phi-phenomenon.org/ http://www.phi-phenomenon.org/ which attempts to create a definitive weighted-aggregate of movie rankings using: many different types of lists to measure film quality ... polls of the general public, of academics, of critics, and of filmmakers. Some of these polls ask respondents to list their favorite films. Others ask respondents to rate a large number of films. There are single author lists by critics, academics, and filmmakers. There are lists that focus on how films are rated by video guides or on how many awards the films received. Some lists try to call attention to obscure films. Others stick to the obvious choices. Some attempt to measure film quality directly. Others include factors such as the historical importance of the film. The use of different types of lists and the statistical methods used help to minimize the effect of factors other than quality in order to create a purer measure of a film's greatness. It is not perfect, but it is closer to perfect than any other method is.
- bhaumik 11y agoLooks interesting, too bad they stopped after 2012.
- mangeletti 11y agoThe author might be mistaken. I think there's a pretty chance this is simply a demographical difference between the sites' visitors, and I'm pretty disappointed this wasn't brought up early on. Rotten Tomatoes is a hipstometer (if you don't believe me, look at the artsy film festival movies that rank highest there, or read some of the pedantic reviews). Fandango is what a lot of the RT fans would call a "low brow" venue. More Hollywood-ish (huge budget, unrealistic, etc.) movies (transformers, 2012, The Fast & The Furious, etc.) rank well on fandango, but not on Rotten Tomatoes. The really great movies rank well on both (e.g., Captain Philips, Life of Pi, etc.). It's always been this way. I use a specific formula of Fandango, iTunes and Rotten Tomatoes scores to decide on a movie. If Fandango ranks it 4-5 stars and Rotten Tomatoes ranks it 50-70%, it's usually really good. If the rank is lower on Fandango and higher on Rotten Tomatoes, it's usually a bit too artsy and pretentious for me (I go watch a movie to be entertained, not to stoke my ego).
- johnchristopher 11y ago> If the rank is lower on Fandango and higher on Rotten Tomatoes, it's usually a bit too artsy and pretentious for me (I go watch a movie to be entertained, not to stoke my ego). Crass anti-intellectualism. I like the Sundance Festival, Movies from all over the world and wouldn't got see 2012 on screen but I don't go pissing online on fans of Transformers. Your definition of `artsy and pretentious' is just `things I don't like'.
- hugh4 11y agoThat's why he said "too artsy and pretentious for me" instead of "too artsy and pretentious in absolute terms and those who disagree can suck it". Chill, nobody is insulting your taste in movies.
- johnchristopher 11y ago> Chill, nobody is insulting your taste in movies. Yes, he is: the insult lies in the use of the `pretentious', 'artsy' and 'pedantic' word and the condescending tone regarding non-Hollywood movie. What if I told you a lot of people find Transformers: Dark of the Moon as pretentious and vapid as its title is ? One more thing ™: s/stoke my ego/make my brain sings
- InclinedPlane 11y agoReviews in general are crap for several reasons. One is just pure statistics and design. The typical "average" review score is a mean. And a mean tends to bias towards higher scores, especially when the floor isn't zero. Consider Amazon reviews, for example, which is a 1 to 5 star system. Amazon has half-star increments for the average rating, so you'd think that leaves a lot of dynamic range for reviews, but in practice only the very highest averages are worth considering, everything else is a crap shoot. Consider something that is near universally considered bad by reviewers, it takes 3 1-star reviews for every 5-star review to bring the average down to a 2-star. A 2:1 min:max ratings ratio leads to the same average, and a 1:1 ratio leads to 3-stars. A 1:2 ratio (where 1/3 of all customers have an awful experience) results in around a 4-star average. So you have a situation where a 1-star average means something is universally horrid, and 2 through 4 stars are just variations of awfulness, with only 4.5 stars and above meaning that more than 3/4 of reviewers had a good experience. Obviously the better metric would be a median, or something similar, but that would lower the average ratings and lead to fewer purchases, most likely. The other big problem, especially with media, is that the ratings are from self-selected groups. In many cases, especially media, the only people who are going to go out of their way to experience something are folks who are going to be predisposed to liking it, while most other people stay away and thus won't even rate it. All of which is beside the elephant in the room, which is the fact that in art there's no such thing as an objective universal scale of quality. You absolutely cannot place movies, books, television, or games on a linear number line of "quality" and have those numbers be consistent and sensible. The best that you can hope for is a general sense of whether a lot of people like something or not and the intensity of that like, beyond that you need to actually dig into what people are saying, and who, deciding if it's worth the risk to watch/read/etc. and then deciding for yourself how you feel about it.
- dennisgorelik 11y agoSkewed absolute rating is not a problem at all. The problem happens when bad things are rated better than good things.
- raykaye47 11y agoI had no idea Fandango was owned by NBC. I will never buy tickets there now
- jbpetersen 11y agoIt always surprises me that most rating sites don't even take the basic step of normalizing their ratings to a more even distribution.
- bostik 11y agoOh wow, that's rich. Quoting from the article: Sites like Rotten Tomatoes that aggregate movie reviews into one overall rating are being blamed for poor opening weekends. The best part is that the quote above even provides a link to the reference they are using for the made statement.[0] In effect, the studios are complaining that news of the films' crappiness are spreading too fast. Let that sink in. The studios confess that their productions are so awful they couldn't be used even for guano. It's almost as if the availability of reviews was the reason for such bad box office performance - not the dubious quality of the object being reviewed. When a bunch of reviews can undo the effects of a massive, weeks or months long marketing push, I'd say it's time to rethink your product strategy. 0: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/summer-box-office-how-movie-819250 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/summer-box-office-how-...
- sandworm101 11y agoThe same arguments are made when "pre-release" copies appear online. The last thing the studios want is informed consumers. I say "pre-release" because more often than not the film has been released in one market but not another, for instance to set-top boxes in asia while it is still in theaters in north america. The games industry follows the same pattern. Reviewers with early access, actual early access, are routinely barred from saying anything publicly until the game is released. Publishers don't want knowledge of potentially game-breaking bugs getting out prior to purchase.
- Retra 11y agoIf only films could be pre-ordered!
- brianclements 11y agoSometimes I get really excited when, in rare circumstances, the bottom line is suddenly tied directly to the quality of a product, and not just the roll-out from the sellers PR machine. Frankly, I didn't expect online reviews to have that much of an effect, but it feels so good to have the money do the talking in this case.
- OSButler 11y agoI usually only check ratings & reviews after watching a movie, just to see what other people think about it. Seeing how easy it is to game such online ranking systems and how tastes can differ, not only on a personal level but also on the current mood, I simply don't trust the scores without having been able to make up my own opinion. The same goes for any other aggregate "review" site, e.g. restaurant reviews. Those are even worse for restaurant owners, since a bad review can stick around, even if you used its mentioned points to improve your service. At least movies don't usually change over time (Star Wars being one of the few exceptions), but it's still annoying to get caught up in a hype only to be bitterly disappointed, or the other way around, finally watching a movie after hearing so many bad things about it and then thoroughly enjoying it, making you wish you had seen it on the large screen instead. ...and not to forget paid social marketing, especially when it's not being disclosed.
- jmckib 11y agoAs someone who relies on online movie ratings (not Fandango), how do you choose movies then?
- OSButler 11y agoI usually base it on the movie's stars, theme or genre, then read up its synopsis (short movie description on imdb or theater's website), and if it's less likely to have some kind of twist or I don't mind spoilers at the time, then I'll watch the trailer. I'm also not really picky, so don't mind giving a movie a try without knowing anything about it in advance (Dancer In The Dark, Oldboy, and Snowpiercer come to mind as wonderful surprises, for example).
- bhaumik 11y agoNote: Rotten Tomatoes is a property of Warner Bros, whose box office revenue was signficantly affected by the ratings last summer.
- makeitsuckless 11y agoOf all the ratings, IMDB are the most useless of all. Especially for quality movies that have gathered enough of a reputation to be watched by the masses of tv or netflex, who then proceed to rate them low for being "boring". Pretty much all of those converge on a rating of around 6.2, including some great classics, whilst lots of Hollywood lightweight entertainment has 7+ ratings. The only good cinema to escape this faith are black & white and non-English speaking movies, because the unwashed masses of IMDB avoid those.
- saiya-jin 11y agofor me personally, IMDB works damn well for almost all movies (except family/sport stuff which ain't my cup of tea). probably the attitude "I am above all the stupid masses" tells a bit about you... hollywood "classics" that have rating around 6.2 are mostly piece of cr*p IMHO, unwatchable/boring these days except if you have some strong bias towards it due to special childhood memories or something. the true classics, be it from 40s, 50s or 60s (that are in top 250 for example) are damn fine movies that stood the test of time with flying flags. only last week I found my way& time to watch Citizen Kane. what a movie and performance! Too bad Wells didn't get well deserved regognition in US for his work, that's US public voting with their cash at their worst...
- rconti 11y agoYou might think the parent is condescending, but I've noticed the same thing. VERY few movies are anywhere lower than 6 stars or higher than 7 stars on IMDB. It's almost worthless. Not because my taste is so superior to the reviewers, but because the scale is so coarse.
- bluedino 11y agoThere are a ton of 4, 5, and 6 rated movies. I use IMDb at the video store and won't pickup anything that isn't at least a mid-6.
- cm2187 11y agoWhat would be interesting is to follow the evolution of big blockbusters on imdb through time. Perhaps I am confused but I think I spotted a pattern where around their release date they have very good ratings and then they trend toward very different ratings. Which feels like the ratings are manipulated during the marketing period.
- mehrzad 11y agoThe 4.1 to 4 and a half star rounding up issue happens on the play store too, I think. Surprised no one brought it up.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoI wonder it it comes from programming languages which silently truncate the fraction part of a float when using it as an integer.
- qznc 11y agoIt might just be sample bias. While users of Rotten Tomatoes are more serious and critical movie watchers, Fandango users are probably more casual movie goers who can enjoy any movie. If I'm out on a date and want to have some fun, I don't care that much about the quality of a movie. Some stupid action flick like Transformers is fine.
- greggman 11y agoI look at RT but I take it with a grain of salt. I've seen many 95%+ movies that I didn't like. My tastes might be different than the mainstream or the critics and I can be picky but, there's also the issue that the number on RT is the percent of people that didn't hate the movie. So, you can get 100% if everyone thought the movie was just ok but no one thought it sucked. All the reviews could be just mildly positive rather than glowing.
- ggregoire 11y agoFor French people I highly advise http://www.senscritique.com http://www.senscritique.com You can follow people who have the same taste of you in movies and then site shows you the rating according to these people (plus a global rating based on the whole community)
- mtarnovan 11y agoI generally use this settings when looking for a movie on movieo.me: http://imgur.com/X4xsXaX http://imgur.com/X4xsXaX. When I'm extra bored, lazy or uninspired and just want some mindless entertainment, I might filter by movies with decent (70+) IMDB ratings, and allow lower RT and Metacritic scores, although I have regretted this a number of times.
- pmcpinto 11y agoI usually don't trust on online movie ratings. The only platform that have some ratings similar with my tastes is Letterboxd: http://letterboxd.com http://letterboxd.com
- aleem 11y ago> if you ask people about a movie after they’ve paid $15 for it and devoted a couple of hours of their life to it, maybe they’ll have a more favorable opinion of the work. Maybe the profoundly rightward shift in Fandango’s bell curve is just a moviegoer’s version of Stockholm syndrome. This is called the Endowment Effect[1]. I suspect it happens when you spend a considerable amount of time picking the "right" movie. Admitting to yourself that you made the wrong pick is harder than consoling yourself that it wasn't so bad after all. Often times the bias will manifest itself in the subtlest of ways--for example a survey of "How would you rate the movie you picked?" versus "How would you rate the movie?" can skew ratings positively in the case of the former. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect
- SyneRyder 11y agoMaybe of interest to some here is MovieLens[1], a research project from University of Minnesota that makes personalised movie recommendations based on your own ratings. You can dive behind the scenes and switch between different algorithms, compare its predicted score against the average review score, and there's a page with statistics on your own ratings. (Preferred genres, ratings curve, ratio of mainstream to obscure movies, etc.) After rating 250+ movies on there myself, my own ratings demonstrate the same right-skew graph curve that IMDB and Fandango has in the article. [1] https://movielens.org https://movielens.org
- DonaldFisk 11y agoThis (collaborative filtering) is a better approach, but it depends very much on the algorithm used, and how many movies you have already rated. I have not subscribed to MovieLens, and don't know what algorithms it uses. I developed an online recommendation system (see http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/morse/MORSE.html http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/morse/MORSE.html for details) about 20 years ago. For a user who had entered sufficient ratings for other movies, the algorithm I used (described in the paper) performed better than the more widely used average of M nearest neighbours, which in turn is better than simply averaging everyone's ratings. All it used were the individual ratings given by its users. It was entirely agnostic as to genre (which is quite fuzzy), cast, or crew. I was aware of a tendency for people to rate movies more highly if they watched them recently, but never asked users for this data. Surprisingly, using the ratings of only the one person whose tastes are closest to your own (i.e. M=1) results in very inaccurate predicted ratings.
- downandout 11y agoWhile I generally agree with the sentiment of this article, Rotten Tomatoes and its ilk have problems of their own. Virtually every small-budget independent film on the site winds up with a very high rating, likely thanks to the big-budget hating, pretentious film critics whose reviews it compiles and summarizes. Likely for the same reason, some larger budget films that receive high RT scores from audiences receive low RT scores from professional critics. In short, it's impossible to trust RT's ratings of independent films, as they just can't all be that good, or its ratings of big budget films, as they can't all be that bad. If a movie looks good to you, go see it - whether or not RT tells you to.
- wodenokoto 11y agoYeah, the thing that is really important about reviews, is that you as a reader knows the reviewer and their taste. So we really need something similar to Netflix rating system, where the rating displayed to you is generated from users with similar taste who have already seen the movie. http://tastekid.com/ http://tastekid.com/ let's you search for movies you might like based on movies you do like. It's not quite the same, but I don't know any other.
- Udik 11y agoTry http://www.criticker.com http://www.criticker.com I've been using it for years, it's pretty good.
- ownagefool 11y agoUnless you know, you're also a tad pretentious, just roll with the audience scores. Audiences don't care about art. It's more difficult to buy the audience and you can't really intimidate them into giving you good reviews. The audience will nuke those independent films because they don't care that it was an amazing achievement from a small studio. The audience will likely tell you the truth. When it comes to PC gaming, it's been fairly well established for a long time that you can't really trust most of the reviewers. They're either bought and paid for, intimidated or not giving enough time to evaluate. I've been relying on user scores for a long time and whilst I doubt this is perfect, I'm happy with my decision. Example: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/grand-theft-auto-v http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/grand-theft-auto-v
- k__ 11y agoMy experience has shown that the only movies worth looking at are rated > 7/10 anything below is mostly crap. But this only works for movies that are mainstream BUT not too real blockbusters. Because stuff like the fast and the furious or transformers gets good ratings anyways. But I use such ratings only to get something light on a boring evening. Mostly I watch ArtHaus stuff and don't look at those ratings.
- giblet 11y agohttp://www.rottentomatoes.com/search/?search=transformers http://www.rottentomatoes.com/search/?search=transformers http://www.rottentomatoes.com/search/?search=fast+and+furious http://www.rottentomatoes.com/search/?search=fast+and+furiou...
- throwaway7767 11y agoMy own experience is that there is no correlation between online rankings and my own enjoyment. I enjoy some higly-rated popular movies, and I hate many of them with a passion. Many of my favorite movies, which I would consider truly great, are somewhere around 4-6 on IMDb/metacritic because they don't have mainstream appeal. Suggestion engines like NetFlix or Spotify don't seem to do any better at predicting what I like. There's no accounting for taste.
- cJ0th 11y agoThat's exactly my experience. What's more, I find that people tend to rate a comedies more positively than movies from other genres.
- Houshalter 11y agoThere are a lot of problems with star ratings in general. I believe they should be normalized to a more sensible distribution. So e.g. exactly 20% of things have 5 stars, and exactly 20% have 3 stars, etc. Or a more gaussian distribution so most things get 3 stars, and truly good or bad things get 1 or 5 stars.
- jaynos 11y agoReminds me of this [1] movie poster for "Legend" that does a great job of turning a 2 star review from The Guardian into what appears to be 4 stars. [1]https://twitter.com/benfraserlee/status/641368752798306304 https://twitter.com/benfraserlee/status/641368752798306304
- nitelord 11y agoFandango can't be trusted to give an unbiased rating because they're trying to sell you tickets to the movie. On the other hand, movie studios have a lot to gain by gaming sites such as IMDB and rotten tomatoes while these sites wouldn't exist if their users knew their ratings were paid for. As others have pointed out, I have noticed that movies tend to be very highly rated on IMDB during the first week or two of a movie being released to theaters. With the amount of money on the line I wouldn't be surprised if movie studios were creating fake accounts and reviews on a massive scale in an effort to generate positive ratings, especially if review sites aren't accepting the movie studio's money to fake the rating.
- stefek99 11y agoHmmmm... I never took online reviews / ratings too seriously. Why would I bother about some random website?