Why You Should Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings (fivethirtyeight.com) 184
An anonymous reader writes: Statistical news blog fivethirtyeight.com noticed some odd discrepancies in online movie ratings, which caused them to do some investigating. They found it was generally a bad idea to rely on such ratings, particularly from sites like Fandango. "When I focused on movies that had 308 or more user reviews, none of the 209 films had below a 3-star rating. Seventy-eight percent had a rating of 4 stars or higher." Further, "In a normal rounding system, a site would round to the nearest half-star — up or down. In the case of Ted 2 [which was displaying 4.5 stars], then, we'd expect the rating to be rounded down to 4 stars. But Fandango rounded the 'ratingValue' [4.1] up. I pulled the number of stars listed on the page of each film in our sample of 437 (with at least one user review), as well as the ratingValue listed on the page's source. And I found that Fandango doesn't round a rating down when we'd mathematically expect that ... Fandango.com's rounding methodology, even if it was just an innocent bug, is a good example of why you should be skeptical of online movie ratings, especially from companies selling you tickets."
Very suspicious.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Also remember that the minimum you are allowed to give on most sites is 1 out of 5, meaning even if everyone hated the movie it would have a "1". In other words people think of the "out of 5 stars" as a system of zero stars to 5 stars but in reality it is one star to five stars.
Example:
One person hates the movie and gives it "1"
One person love the movie and gives it "5"
The average is "3", which visually is not the middle,
Despite only 50% of people liking the movie it appears as if 60% like the movie
Also, s
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The biggest problem is that we're using an all-positive scale to capture positive and negative opinions. The results will never be interpreted correctly because that's a feature of the system. "How much did you like this movie: a little, somewhat, a good amount, quite a bit, or a lot?" It's Colbert's "Great President or the greatest President?" bit, only with the expectation of being taken seriously. The RT method at least addresses this, to some extent.
But there's still a lot missing in terms of magnit
Some mod(s) will hate this, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason I don't trust online movie ratings is because Dr. Who is popular. And Dr. Who is not something I can tolerate. In short, a large part of the populace's taste is not my taste, so those stars... meaningless to me.
And sure enough, there are movies I loved that got poor ratings, and movies I thought were utter tripe that got high rankings.
Same thing goes for Silkel and Ebert and that class of professional opinionators. Their taste is not my taste. So they can't be trusted by me.
With this in mind, a site's questionable rounding of 4.1 to 4.5... not even on the radar.
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Probably the most reliably movie ratings are the recommendations given by sites selling DVD/BluRays, as they have a financial interest in actually providing accurate results.
Sites paid for by movie advertising have a financial interest in recommending whatever movie has the biggest advertising budget.
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Rotten Tomatoes I've suspected of Payola (Score:5, Interesting)
A friend is in the movie biz and his reaction to any criticism of the recent Star Trek reboots is Rotten Tomatoes is an objective measure. I can forgive him the logical error because he's in the industry and the financials are more important to him than say to you or I. So aggregated movie reviews that drive customer purchases to him indicate success.
However, as far as I know, Rotten Tomatoes never publishes its weighting formula
And it's opened by a movie studio.
This seems to me perfect for abuse.
Re:Rotten Tomatoes I've suspected of Payola (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, in part you need to remember these reviews are done by the entire movie-going public, and not just nerds.
So, it is entirely possible that you disagree with the movie-going public. But I don't think that means the reviews aren't honest.
I'm pretty sure TFA even says that both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB consistently come out pretty close to one another.
I trust both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, because I've actually seen movies which are terribly reviewed, and which should have been.
But assessing your opinion of the Trek reboots vs the general opinion of them isn't really the point.
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That was a particularly poor film. While 11% does seem low compared to other horribly poor films with the same production values, it doesn't seem low if you remove production values as a component - since without those the film is total excrement.
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At the end of the day, a review is a professional opinion.
There are tons of movies the critics loved, but the public hated. Likewise, there's a bunch the critics hated, but the public loved. Then you get movies like Gigli [imdb.com], which everybody hated, and which IMBD [imdb.com] says i the 50th worst movie of all time.
You take your tastes, combine it with the reviews of critics and any other sources, and decide if you want to see it or not. Then you figure out how you really thought about it.
Critical review often has nothi
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Reviews can be useful, in that they can tell you what's good about the movie and what's bad. I pay much more attention to the text than the rating, since that can only be for one set of tastes, which I won't share entirely if at all.
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Sometimes it's a good idea.
Sometimes a movie comes along, and you think "if they did this well, it will be great, but if they don't do it it will be complete dreck". And it takes a couple of reviews to figure out which it is. Sometimes the review confirms your fear that, yes, it really is a terrible movie.
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I wonder if the film critics had some kind of beef with the cast or crew and took it out on them in the reviews, as there are plenty of similarly poor 'Sci-Fi' genre films scoring in the 40-55% range, which seems more reasonable, but I would have expected at least better than 30%.
More likely they had a beef with Scientology.
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You're thinking of Battlefield Earth. After Earth is that horrid movie Will Smith bought as a vehicle for his son which, AFAIK, has nothing to do with Scientology.
No, I am not confounding them. And as far as I care to know, After Earth has something to do with Scientology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Earth#Scientology_themes [wikipedia.org]
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You don't seem to understand how the tomatometer works. Instead of it being similar to a 1-10 or star rating that gives an average over review scores, it is simply what percentage of reviewers were positive instead of negative. I find it quite easy to believe that only 1 out of 10 professional critics found the movie good overall. Now, rottentomatoes also averages the score of the same reviewers and for After Earth it gets 3.8/10. I suspect when you were expecting better than 30%, you were thinking somethin
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Atlas Shrugged has one fourth the number of reviews, it got the 11% having just 5 critics like it. That's like a margin of error. Never mind the fact that they probably had less expectations than a big budget movie with acclaimed actors (but they did indeed rate it less than After Earth on average). And I did not like Ender's Game at all, but that is mostly because it missed all the important points of the book, I am sure the vast majority of the reviewers had never read the book and some might not even be
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my method is to find a movie critic whose opinion makes sense to you, ie) valid criticism or praise that you can recognize. And trust in them to continue to make observations that you can agree with.
Mine is Mark Kermode. He's an old lefty, and far too openly feminist at times, but very entertaining, and the very moment he described the poignancy of Four Lions was the moment I knew I could trust what he was saying.
Him and Simon Mayo do a 90 minute show on fridays on the BBC radio thing. podcasts are avail
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I've noticed a lot of people tend to be rather binary in their ratings. If they didn't like the movie, 1 star. If they liked it, 5 stars. I often think user ratings would be better off with a simple thumbs up/down. That is, did you enjoy the movie/game/whatever or not? 1 to 10 scales are particularly bad, because everyone has a different idea about what a value of 7/10 represents. By boiling it down to a binary decision for everyone, you eliminate the ambiguity of how the scale is interpreted.
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I am a fan of the Original Mad Max movies (Mad Max, Road Warrior). Having perused the wonderful reviews of Fury Road, i decided I would watch it.
As a movie it was passable, but not 5 Star great.
I really liked the movie Avatar, except for the Fern Gully / Pocahontas plot lines it was fantastic experience. But I only would give it 4 stars (because of the plot), so something like Fury Road was at best (IMHO) a 2.5 It was fair, plot lines were fairly flat, characters were mostly one dimensional. I'm glad I didn
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I've always felt that the way many people think about movie reviews is generally flawed. They seem to go to imdb or rottentomatoes and say something like "Oh, movie X got high user reviews. It must be a good movie." To me, what they should really be saying is, "Movie X got high user reviews. People who go to this kind of movie generally liked it." I think a good example of how these are different is the movie Jurassic World. It got 70%+ from both audiences and critics on rottentomatoes and more than 7
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I was surprised to learn that @sandbagger is right: Rotten Tomatoes has been a subsidiary of Flixster since 2010, which was in turn purchased by Warner Bros. in 2011.
I never had much reason to question their weighting formula, though, mostly because Rotten Tomatoes has a good distribution of ratings from 0% to 100%, and because there is not much fine-grained scoring on each review, just "positive" or "negative".
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As far as I know RT's weighing formula is simply the total numerical score given to a movie from reviewers divided by the number of reviewers. That's why their scores show all decimal points (6.4/10 or 3.1/10); there is no rounding. You can select which reviewers are included in their rating but it's still simple math.
The freshness rating is another creature entirely and while quasi-related to the score, the reviewers are free to rate a movie fresh or not independent of the score they gave it. That's why
Influence within Time Warner (Score:2)
Rotten Tomatoes has been a subsidiary of Flixster since 2010, which was in turn purchased by Warner Bros. in 2011.
But does Warner Bros. Pictures have any more influence over Rotten Tomatoes than it has over CNN [pineight.com]?
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Rotten Tomatoes sure spammed the h*ll out of Wikipedia! How they managed to get away with that without being shut down by the powers that be is beyond me!
Or maybe they caught the fancy of the same OCD autists who love the word "portmanteau" and they spread the spam far and wide... who knows?
Ummm .... duh? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean people on the intertubes selling us stuff might not be honest about the reviews of the stuff they're selling us?
IMDB, sure, I mostly trust them. Because a LOT of people review things on IMDB. Rotten tomatoes is an aggregator which includes a lot of sources. I mostly trust them to be independent and coming from real sources.
But, really, ANY review site directly owned by a company trying to sell you stuff should probably a) be required to state their affiliation, and b) assumed to be engaging in a little corporate driven puffery.
From the sounds of it, fandango (which I am admittedly not familiar with) is either more likely to give good reviews, or is deliberately skewing to better reviews to sell product.
Are they uniformly rating all movies better (in which case they're just generally bad at reviews or too easily pleased), or if movies from specific studios get pushed up (in which case it's probably getting into a grey area).
The problem with content on the internet is knowing who paid for it, and what other affiliations they have.
Don't most video game sites also just give overly good reviews, often based on a product they've barely seen or have been prohibited from giving bad reviews?
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Agreed.
If the **data** _isn't_ open, then the propaganda and conclusions about the popularity (or lack of it) should be taken with a LARGE grain of salt and healthy skepticism about the validity of the data.
i.e.
* If the data isn't open, question the validity of the data!
e.g.
The only people who trust out-of-date and inaccurate data like the Nielsen Ratings are the people buying and selling broadcast licenses to cable companies.
> The problem with content on the internet is knowing who paid for it, and what
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Sorry, but I stopped trusting IMDB when the best movie in their Top Rated Movies was The Dark Knight.
Re:Ummm .... duh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, look closely at that [imdb.com]:
When 1.5 million people say they liked it, the rating is saying "lots of people liked this film"
Now, contrast that with Shawshank Redemption [imdb.com], which is currently rated #1 on IMDB:
At least they tell you how they got there.
Like Dark Knight or not, it was a wildly popular movie, which brought a very well known graphic novel to the screen. It also got Heath Ledger an Oscar, if you place any value on that.
If you expect such ratings to 100% match your own opinion, you have an over inflated sense of self importance. ;-)
Re:Ummm .... duh? (Score:5, Interesting)
This sort of bias is so endemic to online polling that it's hopeless to try to correct it. All you can do is keep it in mind when you see ratings, and decide that Dark Knight is probably really around a 8.7, not a 9.0. And Shawshank Redemption must be really, really good if it's holding onto the #1 spot despite not appealing to a specific demographic.
I've seen some sites attempt to correct for this by assuming any "real" sample will be gaussian (have a distribution which falls on a normal curve). If the votes something receives are skewed away from guassian (e.g. clustered towards the high end), the site attempts to correct for this by skewing the score down. No idea how accurate or reliable that is, but it is being done in some places.
Rather than try to come up with one, universal rating which is implicitly applicable to everyone, Netflix's approach is probably more sensible. Depending on the movies you watch and the ratings you give them, Netflix builds up a profile of your preferences. They try to match your profile with that of other people who watched similar movies and gave them similar ratings, then makes recommendations based on what those other people watched. So if you hated Dark Knight, then there's a good chance you're not really into movies based on comic bo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgraphic novels, and so will downrate them for you personally.
This does raise some privacy implications, but on the balance I believe this is the more sensible approach to ratings. Giving up some privacy to greatly increase the signal-to-noise ratio of things like movie recommendations may be worth it in some cases. This also mostly corrects for self-selection bias, assuming your self-selection can be accurately measured.
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Nearly all ratings are voluntary, and so suffer from self-selection bias [wikipedia.org]. The measured ratings for general interest movie like Shawshank Redemption are typically lower than a special interest movie like Dark Knight (or Harry Potter, or Twilight, or Lord of the Rings) which appeals to a dedicated fanbase. The latter typically have a lot of fans who rate it highly just because it appeals to their group. That is, they rate it according to more lenient standard than they rate other movies, or they flat-out stuff the ballot box to try to get others to see it, to exaggerate the size of their interest group in hopes of encouraging more such movies to be made.
I agree that there is validity in this argument but a skew based on a fan base tends to be much greater when the number of responses is low. Dark Knight has over 1.5 Million ratings. Yes, a good chunk of them could be die hard fans, but there will also be offsetting low ratings by people who hate the genre, disliked the film, and/or people who didn't even watch the film. The law of averages kicks in to reduce the amount of skew as a result. Could it be skewed towards the high side because of rabid fans,
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In the USA, the electoral college prevents regional factions from having undue influence in elections. In Australia, they achieve the same goal by requiring everyone to show up at the polls. So it seems the self-selection bias problem has already been solved in multiple ways.
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The big problem with Netflix's ratings is that people don't understand them. Which confounds the data. I often give very different ratings on Netflix than I do on IMDb, because I use my personal tastes for the former, and more objective criteria for the latter. Take The Godfather. Objectively, a brilliant film, with outstanding acting, writing, directing, editing, cinematography, etc., etc. A lot of people consider it one of the best films ever made. On IMDb, I wouldn't give it less than 8/10, because I rec
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If you expect such ratings to 100% match your own opinion, you have an over inflated sense of self importance. ;-)
Is this your first day on the Internets? Turns out access to a constant stream of information and interaction actually makes us dumber, less perceptive people.
Or in XKCD terms: Someone is wrong on the Internet. [xkcd.com]
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Yeah, absolutely, I just bought my first internets today at the corner store.
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I agree that IMDB is reasonably trustworthy. But I'd also go to various newspapers to see movie ratings if I'm very interested. However the comments added to a movie on IMDB is sometimes more helpful than the rating - and it's often obvious when a comment is "too good" or "too broad".
Also realize that this applies to all kinds of stuff, not only movies. And on other items the ratings can be downratings as well as upratings by paid posters to promote a certain product and demote another. This may be a freque
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IMDB is a good indication of what the masses think. It's not a good indication of quality overall, since the masses are more an indication of popularity over quality. In fact, the more popular a movie is, the more bland and un-interesting it usually is. Appear to a wider audience usually means appear on a much more limited and conventional base.
TLDR: Popularity is no gauge of quality.
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That's why the comments are good too.
But realize that movies are there for entertainment purposes in most cases so if someone produces a movie that is "good quality" but nobody watches it because it don't provide entertainment, then it may not be good quality after all.
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I definitely read through the comments for movies I'm interested in, but not quite sure about. It becomes a bit of a crap-shoot, but usually I just err on the side of watching them, and am only occasionally disappointed. Worst case, I watch 30 mins of something terrible - but honestly, that's rare enough to not care. Best case, I discover an indie classic or off-beat film I really love :D
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IMDB used to be good except for the fact that you couldn't use the scores to compare different subgenres, of course. However, during the past two or three years their reviews became worthless to me. My guess is some viral marketing agencies have installed hundreds of sock puppet accounts. Or, perhaps just a lot of people who have no clue about cinema have opened accounts there.
What hasn't changed is that a movie below 5 generally sucks, though, so for that it's still useful.
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Not just fandango, anyone is only going to watch movies they expect to like and theoretically people shouldn't be reviewing movies they haven't watched...
So really it's only paid movie critics who are ever going to be watching movies they don't expect to like.
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The same goes for almost everything, I can safely assume that everyone likes cheese but that is not true, but if we put a rating to that it may come up with a 9 out of 10 or maybe more. But that does not mean everybody should buy it and eat it, it just means a lot of people like it, you have to try it for yourself to see if YOU like it.
This is why I find the actual written reviews on IMDB to be vastly more useful than a number. To continue your analogy, if the people who give cheese 9/10 go on to describe why they like it (taste/texture/etc.), someone who hates cheese could skim the reviews and realize "everyone gave cheese 9/10 doesn't mind that their food is literally a giant mass of dead bacteria, this probably isn't a food that I'll like"
Though oddly enough, I find the inverse of the scenario much easier. i.e. 9/10 people say they
Read the actual reviews (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why I always read a sampling of the actual reviews, rather than going purely off ratings. We all have different tastes. Sometimes the things a reviewer points out about a movie as why they hate it are the very things I enjoy.
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Re: Read the actual reviews (Score:2)
Fight Club. But not because the movie was horrible, but because I expected it to be horrible. When it turned out to be fairly descent I enjoyed it a lot more than movies I expected to be good. I've had similar experiences with others, but that one stands out in my mind because I it was so different from what I was expecting.
Only movies ratings? (Score:2)
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This exactly.
Star ratings are hogwash.
I am convinced that when people do star ratings, they mindlessly hit 1 or 5 just to get "rate me!" nag crap out of the way.
The only thing that matters even a little is coherent customer reviews. The problem is that most people don't really take the time to speak about their likes and dislikes. So really, even customer reviews are pretty much worthless.
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I believe that to be true of 1-5 scale ratings. Not enough granularity. 1-10 scales are better, and 1-100 are even better. I think granularity creates better reviews, because not every movie is a 100. But a lot of movies can be 5 stars.
If you think about it this way, 5 Star ratings are divided into 20% ranges, 10 star is 10% ranges, and point scoring is 1%. 20% isn't anywhere close to accurate.
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I would say -5 to +5 would be a better system.
That way you can capture people's DISLIKE of a thing as well as their LIKE.
An all positive number system is just ridiculous.
Let me get this straight... (Score:2)
So I can't trust everything I read on the Internet AND I have to apply critical thinking skills to determine whether a source of information, especially one possibly beholden to financial gain, is trustworthy?
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So I can't trust everything I read on the Internet
I know, right? Can't trust nothin' no more. Some people even post online under fake names. (Not me of course, the Workforbeer's are traditionally honest folk, always have been, always will be.
- Will
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i don't trust a man who will work for just any beer.
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Know what's astounding? People need to be told this.
And that is why those people calling from "the Microsoft" or all of those other scams are still doing it. Because people apparently lack the ability to know this.
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How long before the LGBT community takes offense with the phrase "Let me get this straight..."
It won't necessarily be the LGBT community, most LGBT people I know are cool.
It'll be some some brainless jackass SJW like Laci Green; she'll label it "problematic" and before you know it there'll be a shitload of people screaming about how the phrase "triggers them" and "enables micro-aggressions" and "promotes a cis-centric view", etc etc etc.
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Well, since you've asked: Never. We do generally take offense to really stupid comments made by unfunny asshats though. Keep it up, son. Your dad must be very proud.
In all fairness I'd have to say that the vast majority of LGBT people I know are cool and don't freak out over silly stuff like this.
A lot of SJWs, however, would likely see this as an "discriminatory issue" and they'll be the ones to suddenly make it a "problem that must be dealt with".
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It was funny. Because you took offense to a joke, kinda proves his point. Which makes it even funnier. Nicely done, if that was your intention.
Asylum (Score:2)
If you see "The Asylum" in the credits, you know it's automatically a one-star movie, maybe two stars if they had a better budget.
I do have to say though, they did a really amazing job with Z Nation and I hope Netflix gets the second season soon.
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LOL or what's the other one? Studio 4 or something?
It is interesting to see this knock-off market really take off.
Consumers and content resellers are so desperate for new content that this is clearly an increasingly big void to fill.
I remember years ago I was an eMusic.com subscriber (when their subscription system wasn't such a deceitful money grab), I started seeing a whole lot of "tribute" albums... I thought it was a pretty clever operation. Get around licensing / royalty costs and at the same time incr
Here's a better reason (Score:2)
Why You Should Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings
Because enjoyment is subjective.
Don't trust anything on the internet (Score:2)
I just don't trust anything on the internet by default.
Lazy (Score:2)
Crowd-sourcing opinion is a bad idea, unless you really want to like what other people like. If you have that kind of need for validation, then go ahead.
Better to find a handful of thoughtful reviewers whose opinions you trust.
I don't trust any specific reviewers (Score:2)
Better to find a handful of thoughtful reviewers whose opinions you trust.
Haven't found any yet, at least when it comes to movies. Seriously, I haven't found a reviewer yet that I agree with consistently. And frankly I don't really care about specific opinions. Basically I just want to know A) is the movie of generally good quality and well told and B) is the premise and story likely to interest me.
I've found Rotten Tomatoes to be an ok (though imperfect) proxy evaluation of general quality though it tends to overrate certain types of movies. For example Rotten Tomatoes tends
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You don't have to agree with a reviewer consistently. You only need to understand their frame of reference and trust their ability to think. This is why you get a handful of reviewers, and then decide for yourself. There was a guy who I read, Dave Kehr, and I know where I agree with him and where I don't. I know his preferences and his blind spots. But I know for sure that he's a film scholar and thinks carefully about what he say
Ratings means nothing because people are idiots (Score:2)
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"The actors sucked, there was no story but the special effects were amazing - * * * * *"
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I don't disagree that people are idiots, but I find it hard to believe that people are going to enjoy a movie, then log in to a web site and rate it a '1' because they hate a certain actor/actress. Looking at IMDB ratings, I think the idiots are much more inclined to go see a movie, say "Wow! That was awesome!" and give it an instant '10'. Check out "The Martian" for example. It's only been out a few weeks, but it's now #129 in the Top 250 and has received a '10' rating from 19,500 users/idiots. A pe
IMDB is not bad (Score:2)
I noticed any movie with a score lower than say 6.8 is going to suck and not just because I or someone didn't like the style of movie, its just bad. On there you can usually tell the fake reviews when they are posted very early.
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But some bad movies are great! :)
I agree, though. IMDb's ratings are better than those on most sites. (The only other site I pay much attention to is Rotten Tomatoes.) But even so, I've found cases where I disagree with the general consensus.
Online rating sites get manipulated? (Score:2)
I am shocked! Shocked, i tell you!
Rotten Tomatoes (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, if someone is relying on Fandango to tell them if a movie is any good, they deserve to watch dreck.
Ratings (Score:2)
Ratings tell you - at best - how popular a movie is. Not how good it is. Same as the music charts. It has no correspondence to even sales figures, really. Measuring "sales this month" as opposed to "overall sales" is pretty much a nonsense if you think of it, if the person doesn't already own that product.
Ratings are about what's popular, what other people are liking now. For many, that's ALL they need to know because that's what they base their opinions on and then discuss with their peer group. For
This is why people follow particular reviewers... (Score:3)
This is why people follow particular reviewers, like Siskel OR Ebert back in the day.
Ebert (Score:2)
This is why people follow particular reviewers, like Siskel OR Ebert back in the day.
I only found Ebert helpful because I almost always seemed to disagree with the guy. Nothing against him personally but whenever I watched the show I routinely found myself having a very different opinion if I had also seen the movie.
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Now I have to read wikipedia. Oh well.
People are horrible at rating things (Score:2)
If someone goes out and sees a movie or plays a game and thinks it's awesome they're much more likely to go online and rate it highly, possibly 4 stars but more likely 5 stars (because people tend to extremes, especially when feeling emotional.) If someone sees a movie or plays a game and thinks it sucks
Obligatory XKCD (Score:2)
Star Ratings Meaning [xkcd.com] according to XKCD
Even honest ratings skew high (Score:2)
Not to dispute that a site like Fandango will lie for money, but for the data from the Netflix challenge several years ago - where they made available an anonymized sample of peoples' movie ratings - the mean was 3.8 (https://www.igvita.com/2006/10/29/dissecting-the-netflix-dataset/), not the 3.0 one might expect for a random distribution over the range 1 to 5.
Upon reflection, this makes sense as people don't watch movies randomly - they watch what they think might be good and avoid what they think will be
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Yeah, I've noticed that my ratings on Netflix skew well above three. I'd like to help train the system better in my dislikes as well as my likes, but I'm not really willing to rate movies I haven't watched, and there's a lot of movies I'm not interested in watching.
They do have an "I'm not interested in this" option, though, so that probably helps. But it's also probably not reflected in their star ratings (nor should it be).
Whoah, hold on there, cowboy (Score:2)
Wait, you mean someone on teh intarwebz might LIE?
Say it isn't so!!
It is not the rounding (Score:2)
No matter how the rounding is made, as long as it is monotonous, a 4.5 star will always have a better rating than a 4 star.
It is also obvious that ratings are relative. If 4-4.5 is average then so be it. Not very accurate but it gives you an idea.
The problem is who is behind the ratings. Shills are an obvious cause of bogus ratings, however, even honest reviews may be troublesome. A typical thing is that when looking at ratings, you are usually looking for the best. Conversely, reviewers tend to give 5 star
3/5 = "decent movie"? Uhhhh, No. (Score:2)
FTA:
"You decided to check out 'Fantastic Four' ... Fandango users thought it was good! Over 7,000 people had reviewed it, and it had an average of 3 out of 5 stars. This is going to be a decent movie."
This article must be targeted at people who would see a 3/5 rating for a movie and conclude that the users "thought it was good". I would interpret a 3/5 from 7000 users (or a 6/10 on IMDB) as an indication that the movie probably sucks. No way would I pay theater prices to go see it based on a 3/5.
A big bud
Re: (Score:2)
Anything with more than 2 options is too much granularity for a movie rating system.
Why You Should Be Suspicious of All Online Ratings (Score:2)
.
All online ratings and reviews are played with and are dubious, at best.
There are some good ratings/reviews, such as this review of a book of random numbers [amazon.com].
But, for the most part, online reviews should be viewed with a good deal of skepticism.
You can stop earlier than that (Score:2)
Why You Should Be Suspicious of Online...
Shh! Stop. Say no more. Right there with you.
In other news (Score:2)
Point of the article is not the individual reviews (Score:2)
The article isn't questioning the reviews themselves at all. It questioned Fandango's rounding method, which presents higher averages than other sites would with the same review ratings.
s/Movie// (Score:2)
There, fixed it...
I Don't Trust Any Star Ratings (Score:3)
I really don't trust any ratings done by "consumers" because the way I see people do ratings is, if they like it it, they give five stars, and if they don't like it, they give one star. Also, on seller sites such as eBay, or Discogs, it seems you're expected to give five stars to any seller who merely sends you the thing you ordered. Obviously, that leaves no room for a seller who goes above and beyond. If you give less then five stars, they'll flip out. I guess I can't blame them since that is the convention, now. Nevertheless, it makes the five-star rating system useless.
Another surprise for me was when I found out the ratings on Netflix weren't generated by other viewers, but rather by Netflix guessing what I would think, based on my watching history.
A Peter Travers quote - sure sign of a bad film (Score:2)
I always used to laugh out loud when I saw a quote in the paper about a film and it was from Travers. Pretty much that told me to avoid the film.
You can tell he's the critic of last resort that studios call upon when they have a bomb on their hands.
It's 2015 (Score:2)
It's 2015.
If people at this point don't understand that there are PAID individuals (by the thousands) who will fill forums with whatever you want, vote whatever you want on whatever online poll, and generally astroturfing the shit out of anything of any actual value whatsoever (and a fairly large amount of stuff that DOESN'T matter, as well), then they're so oblivious and stupid that they shouldn't be allowed to care for themselves, much less handle money or purchases.
Re:No Fix (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Why is "Starship Troopers" somewhat alike Tom Clancy ?
Re: (Score:2)
I liked it enough so that I'll watch it again sometime, but what really pissed me off was that they went the cheap route by completely ignoring the suits/uniforms the troopers were supposed to have. As you probably know, they were supposed to have some sort of super combat suits. Instead, the "mobile infantry" in the film is only "mobile" because they're able to friggin walk around! Lame, lame, lame!
If they want to make a parody of the society in the book, fine, but they shouldn't have stolen that title