I don’t trust IMDB after Amazon bought it. Maybe a company that makes movies shouldn’t be in charge of rating them? Conflict of interest maybe?
Hudson Hawk, widely panned, is fun; just refuses to take itself seriously.
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iMDB: 5.7/10
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RT: 30/100
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Metacritic:17/100
I don’t care. That’s what I think of any film rating system. It’s a report, but not the experience itself.
See also: the Southland Tales, The One (2001), Lost Souls (2000). All are, objectively, bad films. And yet… I remember them to be re-watchable.
This write-up is on a site for and app and ends up shilling for that app, but it makes some useful points, confirmed by my years of poking around:
Trust Metacritic most for prestige drama, arthouse cinema, and Oscar contenders.
Trust IMDb most for genre films.
Use the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer as a quick pass/fail for critical reception.
Use the Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score cautiously.
Full disclosure: I don’t have the app, don’t want the app, and don’t care about the app. Also, I skimmed the article in 2 minutes while watching my kids bounce on a trampoline.
I just skimmed it too and it reeks of slop…
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It never affects my enjoyment of a thing. But if I’m already questioning whether or not I want to continue, that rating makes a difference.
I really like The Postman, but I was surprised it had fairly negative reviews
Yeah, seriously. I didn’t realize it was so shit on. I mean it isn’t like top 10, but I’d definitely stop and watch it and enjoy it.
Same. But I’m very into the post apocalyptic genre.
I don’t think I have ever once looked at the ratings score on a film.
Which is weird, because I’m active on rateyourmusic and do put stock in those ratings, and I also pretty religiously check customer reviews on Steam for games.
But for whatever reason, I couldn’t care less what people think in terms of film. 🤷
I saw “The Bride” in theaters a few months ago and the fact that that movie ISN’T a 0 on imdb invalidates the whole concept of critic reviews for me. Worst movie I have ever seen (and I’ve seen “The Room” twice)
Oh, hi Mark
You’re my favorite customer
IGN 6/10 review for Mouse: PI
Do people really trust ratings for things? It seems like we are so far removed from those number meaning anything useful I’ve long been ignoring them.
I’m with you on this. It may be useful to get an idea of probably bad, probably good, but not as a function of quality, since they can easily score amazing a trash movie and write shit about actually high-quality movies.
But, essentially, the score doesn’t say anything, more so when masses are involved. Legions of fans of some actor will, for example, score perfect a movie starring them.
Do people really trust ratings for things?
It’s generally in the ballpark. Universally panned films rank lower than universally loved films. Cult classics tend to score better than average but rarely break into the 8-9 out of 10 range. It’s good to check the “Critics Score” against the “Popular Score”, as a big spread tends to say something about the nature of the film (High C:P suggests Oscar Bait, low C:P suggests it’s either very niche or very crass or very ideological).
The scores contain useful information about the nature and quality of the film. They just don’t tell you whether you will like the film.
I’ll also throw in that I’ve heard more than a few movie reviews that have changed my opinion on a movie I’ve already seen (typically one I’ve seen forever ago that I just remember fondly or disparagingly). Return of the Jedi was my favorite Star Wars movie for years, but I’ve definitely come around on it being the worst of the OT. At the same time, my opinion of The Transformers Movie came up quite a bit after hearing a few reviews raving about the art design, the musical score, and the voice acting. Same with Princess Bride, which I’d mentally written off as some stupid low-budget made-for-TV schlock until I got into college and had friends screening it enthusiastically.
If you’re just cruising for “decent movie to end the weekend” on, surfing through the Criterion Collection will yield a bunch of gems.
Imbd giving 28 years later 7.3/10 is crazy
Not IMDB, but Rotten Tomatoes is dead to me after their score for Boondock Saints was 26% despite a user rating of 91%.
Maybe it’s not a cinematic masterpiece, but it’s a solidly fun movie.
I think one of the reasons the critics came at it so harshly was that it was sort of this meme-movie. Lots of quotable lines. Lots of memorable scenes. But the overarching story kinda sucked. The villains were silly and lame. The heroes were uninspired. The movie parked itself on Irish Dude-Bro demographics and just kinda catapulted itself into cult classic material by casting Willem Dafoe a bit before he went mainstream.
I think it’s better than a 26%. But not all that much better.
I love to chase my toddler around and say “You’re going nowhere! Where you goin’? nowhere!” Before lightly bodyslamming him. Now he just runs around yelling, “I’m not going anywhere”
For me, fan score is a separate axis (how much fun is the film).
I actually just showed my partner the first movie a few weeks ago, somehow she had never heard of it but I was shocked at the scores on imdb.
Is it just me, or is IMDB becoming shittier and shittier?
They recently started demanding an account to read user reviews.
Well it is owned by Amazon
Ah, now it all makes sense to me.
TMDb and NeoDB.social are the hot alternatives.
Sad that IMDB now hide the user opinions behind their login screen. A score alone isn’t helpful at all.
i stopped thinking imdb or rating for entertainment as “how good it is” but rather “the odds of me liking it” i’ve seen plenty 5 or 6 imdb but i absolutely love it. and 9s as meh.
Exactly. Critics are only useful if your opinions are similar to the critics.
Remember, even in recent years movies have been review-bombed for being “woke”, for instance, with hordes of people upset about things that are not important to the movie, attempting to destroy the reputation of the movie rather than evaluate it fairly on its own merits.
I was just watching facts behind “Robin Hood men in tights”, and apparently Siskel gave it half a star, which is absolutely insane. It’s no blazing saddles, but it’s one of the better Mel Brooks movies
So yeah, review scores are basically a good way to decide whether you should go to the theaters and watch it or wait till it’s on streaming. But outside of that, it’s not a good indicator of whether or not you’re going to enjoy the show.
Oh wait. The previous commenter didn’t specify if they’re talking about the critics score or the general public one.
Personally I find I usually agree with the public opinion of movies on imdb, and most things below a 6 I tend to not enjoy. Franchises with hardcore fans are a notorious exception to scores being reliable because they often overhype them (such as Star Wars or Marvel etc). Otherwise the score system works, more or less.
The critics’ score is absolutely meaningless to me. Might as well be a random number for all I care
I think about how I haven’t reviewed a movie on imdb/rotten tomatoes in years. If you haven’t either, then don’t trust the user reviews.
unironically, I loved the mario bros movie from the 90s. It’s rated REALLY low on imdb, but I loved that film.
It’s one of those movies that is a horrible part of its franchise but wouldn’t be so bad just standing on its own. The only thing it really had to do with Mario Bros was it used character names and some items from the games. It was a wtf for fans but if you ignored that part, it was ok on its own.
I think similarly of SW ep 8. It’s an absolute dogshit Star Wars movie but if Rian had instead made up like his own space balls universe except not really funny, and did the same movie there, it wouldn’t have been bad. But instead it made me stop caring so much about Star Wars. Which isn’t really a bad thing tbh, though probably not what Disney had in mind when they bought the franchise.
I’ll be the contrarian and say IMDb ratings are pretty accurate for me. The two exceptions are super inflated Cinema™ ratings and middling ratings for comedies. A 9.3/10 silent era movie gets too much credit for having functional lighting while a 6/10 comedy gets panned for its shallow character development.
Really? I find the opposite problem. Ratings are inflated and even utter trash on IMDB is 6 or 7 out of 10.
I think part of the problem is that the scale is not used properly. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would consider 5 to be average. Most movies seen are average. Average is well worth watching. 5 is a decent rating as far as I am concerned. I’ll even watch a 4 or a 3 if someone tells me that some aspect of the movie was worthwhile. But most people seem to treat the scale as if they only are willing to watch 8 and above, and that anything below a 7 is trash.
It would be much better if there was a site to input your ratings and for it to match you to users and critics similar to your taste. I used to use Last.FM like this for music but haven’t found anything similar for movies or TV. Ratings alone are useless because critics and users alike will swing all over the scale for the same movie. Tastes need to match.
Same as Google ratings. Like it? 5 stars. Hate it, 1 star. No nuance. If it’s below 3.5 stars, absolute garbage. In Japan they somehow treat the rating system as intended. 3 stars is a solid, ok experience. 5 is exceptionally hard to achieve
Google using Rotten Tomatoes for rating is kinda funny for me cuz imdb have its own problems for rating but i never hear people say something like “if a movie is rated high on RT its probably bad” about imdb
RT’s Tomatometer is awful. If everyone would agree it’s a 6/10 movie, they’d score it as 100% fresh. If everyone would agree a movie is a 10/10 they would score 100% fresh as well.
This varies a lot by place. In some countries a 4.0 is an excellent score.
Interesting for this video to have just come up on my feed yesterday.
I have both problems or I am counter-cyclical to IMDb. Anyways. My algorithm now works like this:
IMDb > 5 = potentially good movie
IMDb <=5 = trashRotten Tomatoes > 70% = potentially good movie
Rotten Tomatoes <= 70% = potentially good movie.A LONG time ago back when Netflix first started its rating system was its major speak. I recall articles saying that even if you did not pay for the service, you should make an account just simply to use its rating system to decide your next watch (and then go get them at Blockbuster or something:-P). My, how things have changed in the meantime…
Back when Netflix had anything you wanted to watch instead of the same 100 movies listed in 5 different categories each.
I remember finding a list of the top 100 movies of all time - stuff like Schindler’s List - and perhaps other lists of like most popular in a given year, and only 2 of those were offered via their streaming service at the time (the others only available from their DVD mailing service). Hancock was one, to give you an idea of what that looked like. There is a reason people started calling it “Shitflix”. 🤣
That seems counter-productive, since Netflix was far cheaper than paying per movie at Blockbuster. I used to use Blockbuster the opposite way, going there to browse for movies to order from Netflix. I do miss being able to browse at a physical store.
But, before Blockbuster started its own mailing service, you would have to wait several days for your video choice to arrive. Plus there’s the convenience of having it mailed directly to you, especially if you lived further away from a Blockbuster store I guess. Back when Netflix had virtually nothing to watch (as opposed to later when it merely has nothing WORTH watching, hehe🤪), it wasn’t so bad to have like one season of an old Star Trek mailed to you, even if you went to Blockbuster for actual movie titles.
More realistically, the article I am half recalling was probably trying to drum up subscriber numbers when Netflix was young and first starting out.
Anyway the point was that at one point in time their ratings system was actually considered quite GOOD, back before they got into pushing crap that they would rather you watch instead of stuff that you might actually enjoy.
The real ones had blockbuster deliver by mail, then returned those discs in store same day so to prompt the next delivery. I think it was a buck cheaper than Netflix at the time, too. Yargh
I did the same. There was a point when Blockbuster was the better deal if you had a store close by.
I agree with you, but the problem is, IMDb collates ratings from thousands of people, each of whom have their own scale. I might have the same opinion about a movie, but I rate it as a 5 because it was completely average, and the next person who feels the same gives it a 7.
I would love to use a service that asks you a series of questions about a movie and generates a rating based on that. That way, if you’re honest about your answers, the ratings should match. Questions like “was the acting good?” with answers like “the acting was exceptional,” “the acting was bad,” and “the acting didn’t make me think about it at all.” But if you ask if the movie was good? If it’s a movie about a working man being pushed to the breaking point and he dies, the rich man is going to like that a lot more than a working man.
Then you have review bombing. I think the best example of this is Fullmetal Alchemist. FMA fans believe that no anime should be rated higher than FMA, so if something starts to get popular, they will organise a review bombing of it. Don’t get me wrong, Fullmetal Alchmist was a good anime, but it was also kinda trash. The first series in 2003 did 20-odd episodes, caught up with the manga, then they decided to write their own ending/second half. In 2009 after the books were done, they did a remake, but the first episode was original (not in the books), the next nine summed up the first half of the books (because the 2003 series already covered that), and then the next 50-odd episodes cover the second half of the books, so you have one where the pacing is good but the story goes off the rails (IMO, in a good way, I like where they took it), and another one where it’s more true to the books (except that random ass first episode) but the pacing sucks. To top it all off, the lead actor was accused of sexual misconduct a few years ago and has basically been cancelled online. It’s still an awesome series, but is it so good that nearly 20 years later, nothing can be rated more highly?
I just checked and it’s just the English dub’s VO that’s been cancelled, so who cares?
What dub did you think I meant? Was I, at any point, speaking French, Japanese, German, or Spanish? No, I was not — so why would you think I’d be talking about some foreign language dub?
I hadn’t heard about the voice actor. I wonder if someone has done a fan dub… But yeah, review bombers are scum.
Might I add, a 10 scale is too granular for most people. It should be on 5. Most people have their scale start at 5 and go above. The only time they will go below is to give a 1 to a movie they hated.
Yeah I think this is an issue in general with any kind of 1-10 scale! People tend to think 7+ is good. I don’t think people recognize 5 as average or they see “average” as less than what it actually means - I’m with you that most media is average and that doesn’t mean it’s not worth checking out.
Anyone who creates a scale needs to be super clear about what each interval means lol because I think they get misconstrued all the time.
I do miss the old IMDb review/chat boards though. Before everything just moved to reddit, it was fun to go on there and just talk to people about certain movies. Was so good for when a movie had a confusing/open ending to share theories and stuff. Didn’t get trolls when forums were all separate!
I had a professor in college who believed an A should be reserved for the rare student who really nails a subject. He felt that if he gave a test, and several students got an A on it, it was a bad test. He said that was like having a speedometer on a car that only went to 50. So if you worked really hard in his class and did well, you’d likely get a B. Most students got a C, because that’s average.
I actually agreed with him, but the problem was that the rest of academia didn’t behave that way, so his classes lowered your GPA.
I just joined a site called criticker that aims to fix this via data normalization. It can adjust ratings to the way you rate and base them on people who rate like you as well. Although its database is a bit lacking and all ratings are public.
Also FYI on 1 to 10 5.5 is average, 5 is below average.
On a scale from 1-10, the average is 7. That’s how humans work. You should probably get used to it.
600% this!
I’ve always found imdb way less inflated than Rotten Tomatoes.
90% on RT means that 9/10 reviewers didn’t hate it but they could all have rated it a 6/10.
The wannabe professional reviewers on RT are the absolute garbage. Anything big and you’ll find multiple Nobody McNobodyface from Nowhereton Gazette giving anything top score because they gave a boner for the lead actress.
The scaling on IMDB is bad, 10point scales do not work 5 and below isn’t really used, unless they hate it passionately
10-7 and 1 are the only options
Ah, people.
5 is avreage? Oh so you mean 5 is absolute baseline? Like, treat 5 as 0 yes? Then anything below is basically how much you shouldn’t watch it, no?
My friends balk when I say “Welp, that was 6/10, quite a good movie” xD
i mean, on that scale a 6/10 is barely above average. I’m still looking at you funny foot calling that “quite good”
Personal scale, fully subjective:
- Watch it if you are one of people who always fiddle with phone or sleep at shows
- Drying paint may be better
- Better than nothing
- Kinda meh
EnjoyableSomewhat goodQuite GoodEnjoyable- Good
- Very Good
- Fantastic
- Watch it or die trying
* Got corrected. Now at english better am, I >:3
i guess I’m my mind “quite good” is better than “good”
like “quite” is a synonym to “very” in this context as I understand it. maybe to a lesser degree, but it’s certainly a positive modifier. i would use a similar scale if those two were swapped.
maybe that’s just my dumb american vocab or something, but i would be very confused by that scale as it stands.
My friend, I am non-native, I may be wrong on this xD
ahhh, no worries friend. i like the other commentors suggestion if you have any reason to care lol.
Yeah, you’re using “quite” incorrectly here. Add the other person said, “quite good” means “really good” or “very good.” You want something like “somewhat good.” If it were me, I would change 5 to “decent” and 6 to “enjoyable” since “enjoyable” has a much more positive connotation than I’d expect from the middle of the scale.
This is why approval voting is better than score voting, or rather, score voting quickly becomes approval voting anyways so might as well not overcomplicate matters 🙃
yes but with approval rating the “best” movies are the ones which appeal at least enough to the most people.
True, I was thinking about this some other time too. I think more granularity in votes doesn’t really solve that though, you need some way of weighting approvals. Like determining whose approval matters most.
If the point of a rating is to be used as a predictor for how much you might enjoy a movie, then it might be worth switching to a three star system and weighing the star choices of other reviewers higher or lower based on how many previous movies you rated similiar to them.
criticker seems to try kinda this. It looks like ListenBrainz but for visual media. I only discovered it in this thread
Oh my god that actually looks perfect. Thank you.
I rely on Letterboxd for a glance on rating curvature but that too has become untrustworthy for anything just released big and blockbustery that fortunately isn’t really my thing anyway.
When I see something I really like I go check out the other productions by the people involved. Director and writer mainly, also producers and sometimes actors if they seem to be character actors that pick what projects to be in.
