Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fandango-movies-ratings/

by thehoff • 11 years ago

248 201 11 years ago

raspasov• 11 years ago

Rotten 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."

a8da6b0c91d4• 11 years ago

The 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• 11 years ago

I 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

my favorite bit: "The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."

curun1r2• 11 years ago

The 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

onewaystreet• 11 years ago

Movies 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%.

qrendel3• 11 years ago

Most 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

cooper123• 11 years ago

The 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.

crdb• 11 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation. These (FCH) reviews are awesome. Do you know any other such critics?

a8da6b0c91d4• 11 years ago

The 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• 11 years ago

Really? 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...

http://www.avclub.com/article/armond-white-claims-he-was-kic...

http://www.slashfilm.com/armond-white-prevents-toy-story-3-f...

a8da6b0c91d4• 11 years ago

Ebert was an idiot and an idiot's reviewer.

Steko• 11 years ago

Noticed 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.

mindcrime2• 11 years ago

I'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.

firebones2• 11 years ago

Similarity 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.

mindcrime2• 11 years ago

Yeah, 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.

dopeboy• 11 years ago

That'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.

kakakiki• 11 years ago

yes. I do the same thing. I look at rotten. Then compare with IMDB. Decision made! :)

unexistance• 11 years ago

so true, for me I just have a look at the wikipedia page... Reception & gross total is enough to mentally-prepare me for ANY movies that I'm going to watch

ocean3• 11 years ago

I do the same. I check the synopsis and if interesting i watch it. But i do sometimes watch based on reddit recommendations/upvotes.

mrob2• 11 years ago

I find the same thing. For example, the funniest movie I've ever seen is "Freddy Got Fingered". This is currently rated 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. And the most boring movie I've seen is "Lost In Translation", which is rated 95% there. In both cases I watched them because I liked the lead actor's previous work, and that's had a better success rate than trusting reviews.

knowaveragejoe3• 11 years ago

I'm appalled that for someone out there, Freddy Got Fingered is the funniest movie they've ever seen. Likewise, that Lost In Translation is the most boring.

lmm3• 11 years ago

Freddy Got Fingered is famously divisive, much like Napoleon Dynamite. Many people hate it, some people really like it. If you have to boil that down to a single number 11% is fair, but if throws away a lot of information. Does the site give you a graph of the rating distribution, or even just the quartiles? That might be more informative.

intopieces• 11 years ago

I'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.

curun1r2• 11 years ago

The 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• 11 years ago

Still 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• 11 years ago

Fair 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• 11 years ago

Metacritic

afterburner• 11 years ago

or look at the average rating in RT

vidoc• 11 years ago

I'm even more cautious about yelp ratings!

nathancahill2• 11 years ago

A 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• 11 years ago

Or, 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• 11 years ago

Go watch the latest South Park episode ("You're not Yelping"), it's all about Yelp.

http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s19e04-youre-not-yelpi...

graeme2• 11 years ago

I'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• 11 years ago

It'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.

graeme2• 11 years ago

It'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

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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Anyone 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• 11 years ago

Having 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• 11 years ago

The Fandango scores were also higher than the Rotten Tomatoes user ratings 74% of the time. But yeah, Fandango is obviously incentivized to be biased.

guelo• 11 years ago

What is the deal with IMDB's ratings? It feels like over time all movies end up rated around a 7.

nathancahill2• 11 years ago

That's what happens when you crowdsource ratings. I like Rotten Tomatoes approach with the critics and audience scores.

a_bonobo• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

People 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• 11 years ago

This is explained partially by the Four Point Scale. [TVTropes warning]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourPointScale

abruzzi5• 11 years ago

I 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.

eridius2• 11 years ago

I'm curious, what was the 95% fresh movie that you thought was the worst movie in 2 decades?

copperx• 11 years ago

I'm going to guess Snowpiercer.

bmelton5• 11 years ago

I'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/

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/

abruzzi5• 11 years ago

Snowpiercer. I'm sure some people love it, but I could not think of a single redeeming thing after I got done. I honestly preferred "The Room", (though that ones 'quality' was unintentional.)

4ad• 11 years ago

"Gravity" wasn't the worst in two decades, but it is a pile of crap, and it does have 97% on RT and 7.9 on IMDB.

Demiurge• 11 years ago

This very reasonable. Movies, music, art, can't be reduced to a single numerical score. In this sense no rating 'should' be trusted, but instead we need to make choices based on entirety of context. Seems trivial, yet we always want an easy answer.

abruzzi5• 11 years ago

This is basically my answer as well. I'm the first to admit that my tastes are not very well in line with conventional wisdom (I also cant stand Pixar films..) The closer your tastes are to that sort of normative, middle of the road taste the more useful aggregated reviews will likely be.

Using a single reviewer (or several) only works when someone's tastes are predictable. Using aggregate reviews, can remove the kind of predictability that I can use to predict wether I'd like the movie.

2muchcoffeeman• 11 years ago

The only approach I've found that works is to pick a professional reviewer that is marginally close to my taste

I miss David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz.

kpmah2• 11 years ago

I love RT, but I think people misinterpret the percentage. It doesn't mean that the film was 95% 'good', it means there was a 95% chance you'd like the film and a 5% chance you'd dislike it based on a sampling of professional reviews.

Something to bear in mind is that a slight above mediocre film can have a 100% rating if it has wide appeal.

nrao123• 11 years ago

Here is a great article talking about the differences between RT & Metacritic: http://www.thecroakingfrog.com/blog/rotten-tomatoes-vs-metac...

I personally find that there are less misfires on a good Metacritic score.

chrismcb2• 11 years ago

I think you are the one that is misinterpreting the percentage. 95% means that 95% of the reviews were "positive." Of course it says nothing on whether you will like it or not, because it has no idea what you would like.

aceofpack3• 11 years ago

Finding people that rate in the same way as you is an interesting concept at https://www.mov3y.com

andreasley2• 11 years ago

If only it worked. After rating 50 movies, the "recommended" section still is empty. Also, lots of GUI issues, dead links etc.

aembleton• 11 years ago

Brilliant, thanks for that. Seems great, shame that the recommended tab is empty.

Udik4• 11 years ago

Try http://www.criticker.com Same concept, I'd say it has a simpler and clearer interface.

waterlesscloud• 11 years ago

Agreed.

I'm a serious movie fan. I've seen more movies than the 99.999th percentile of the worldwide public. Officially filtered for a number of film festivals, including at least one you've heard of.

And I still give heavy weight to certain reviewers for general release films. It's all about finding people you more or less agree with.

Sukotto• 11 years ago

I really like the hobby(?) project 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.

bhaumik2• 11 years ago

Looks interesting, too bad they stopped after 2012.

mangeletti2• 11 years ago

The 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).

johnchristopher4• 11 years 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'.

hugh42• 11 years ago

That'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.

rconti2• 11 years ago

Your usage of the phrase "crass anti-intellectualism" is far more absolute, dismissive, and disparaging than anything the parent said.

InclinedPlane• 11 years ago

Reviews 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• 11 years ago

Skewed absolute rating is not a problem at all.

The problem happens when bad things are rated better than good things.

raykaye47• 11 years ago

I had no idea Fandango was owned by NBC. I will never buy tickets there now

jbpetersen• 11 years ago

It always surprises me that most rating sites don't even take the basic step of normalizing their ratings to a more even distribution.

bostik2• 11 years ago

Oh 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-...

sandworm101• 11 years ago

The 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.

Retra2• 11 years ago

If only films could be pre-ordered!

brianclements• 11 years ago

Sometimes 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.

shalmanese• 11 years ago

Before you get too excited, scroll through the Rotten Tomatoes Box Office Rankings: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/browse/box-office/ for a few randomly selected weeks. There's not that clear a relationship between good reviews and box office as you would like.

diminish• 11 years ago

Indeed, since may, I try to check Rotten Tomatoes every week, and I end up choosing good movie openings recently.

Previously subconsciously, I was basing my opening movie choice to actors/actresses playing, to the trailer or the poster. The last 3 Nicolas Cage movies I've seen, ended up being so bad that I started to check Rotten Tomatoes ratings which were in line with what I've experienced.

So review sites are truly killing "cheating" studios' openings which relied on deceptive trailers, posters and "bad-performing" actors/actresses.

[1] Nicolas Cage "overmonetizing his face" http://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/nicolas_cage/

ssharp• 11 years ago

I've been using Rotten Tomatoes as my primary movie filter for a few years now. Although I don't see a lot of them, I can't think of any movie I've enjoyed all the much over that time that wasn't around or above 60%. There are some highly rated movies that I haven't enjoyed, but not the reverse.

dspillett• 11 years ago

This isn't the first time: Gigalo's poor performance at the box office was blamed on people texting their contacts as they left the theatre to say "go see something else instead". I can't remember if that was any form of public statement or an internal memo that leaked out, but either way it is funny.

bostik2• 11 years ago

This is not even a particularly new development.

I remember reading a few articles back in 2010 or 2011 where movie studios were complaining that for some films, only the first viewing of the opening night would be sold out.

They did some research and discovered that people were pushing social media and twitter updates as they were walking out, recommending everyone to just avoid the damn thing. This was at a time when cinemas would have tickets reserved and you could pick them up from the ticket booth.

So what happened, was that people would simply not show up at all and the theatres couldn't even know that there were plenty of unsold tickets until ~1h before the start.

laumars• 11 years ago

I've seen a tendency for Hollywood to blame everyone bar themselves for a long long time. eg generic plot lines are blamed on the cost it takes to produce movies because movie goers demand the latest greatest special effects. Which isn't a complete lie, but then you have a movie like Skyline that manages to have excellent effects and at a fraction of budget of the big box office movies (though sadly Skyline was poor in a number of other areas).

Hollywood also blames piracy, but they now have more ways to deliver their content than ever before, yet remain reluctant to really push their content over any new delivery channels. So you have to question how much of piracy is down to consumers being cheapskates, and how much is due to content holders not keeping up with consumer demand (please note that I'm not endorsing piracy).

The problem with the movie industry is that they are so self absorbed that they think people owe them a decent living. But in reality they're a luxury. And these days a lot of people are cutting back on luxuries. So it's hardly surprising them consumers are voting with their wallets. It really is about time Hollywood woke up and realise that capitalism requires competition rather than whining and litigating whenever they feel their monopolies are threatened.

</rant>

draugadrotten• 11 years ago

The problem with the movie industry is that they are so self absorbed that they think people owe them a decent living. But in reality they're a luxury.

Another way to look at that, is that when I afford myself a luxury, I want to be treated well. Today, when I go to the cinema, I am treated like a potential criminal - I am spoonfed threats about being prosecuted for piracy if I take a photo of the cinema screen with my mobile phone camera and I am spoonfed 20-30 minutes of advertising before the movie I paid to see. None of that gives me a sense of "luxury", but rather a pretty seedy feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. So the next Friday, I light a scented candle, pour a cognac, put some brillat savarin on the table and turn on Netflix's latest series. Now, that's luxury.

eevilspock6• 11 years ago

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.

Whenever a debate about advertising pops up on HN, many people defend it as the necessary way for consumers to find out about good products. Healthy free markets depend on informed consumers, but to think that advertising results in informed consumers makes little sense. I find it strange that a community of logic and science oriented people can hold such a notion.

When communities were small, reputation was king. If your town had two bakers, everyone knew which one was good and which one sucked. No amount of advertising would fool the townsfolk into going to the sucky one.

But this doesn't scale to huge cities with tens, hundreds or thousands of choices. We can't know the reputation of such a wide array, and we can easily be fooled by advertising. Internet-based recommendation systems make the grapevine and reputation scalable. I hope we see more innovation. Yelp is a start, but it fails miserably because if I rate a place 5 because I love very authentic Thai food, and another person rates it a 1 because they are used to Americanized Thai, the restaurant gets a 3 (I'm simplifying for illustrative purposes). In other words, Yelp's rating is useless to both me and the other person.

I'm hoping for a future where recommendation systems and collaborative filtering get so good that they render marketing and advertising useless.

thenomad2• 11 years ago

That'd be nice, but it hasn't happened yet.

I'm not going to make a grand sweeping statement here, but certainly, I've found out about multiple useful products via adverts. I actively don't want them to go away completely.

I am very interested in hearing about new products in a number of spaces. If people can pay to let me know, briefly, about their thing that they think I might find useful, I'm cool with that.

rm_-rf_slash4• 11 years ago

I think the best way to learn about what is good or not is through the opinions of people you respect or agree with enough to take their word for it.

Centralized example: Yahtzee Croshaw of the Zero Punctuation video game reviews eschews any semblance of a ratings system because it's a little absurd to boil down a complex opinion into a number. Watch a review and get a sense of whether you'd like the game or not.

Decentralized example: plug.dj (before it went down. Dubtract.fm kinda sucks) let users get in line to play one song for a room. Some rooms can have you waiting 3 hours to play one song so if you're gonna wait that long you're gonna play a banger.

Yeah it's more effort than a numeric ratings system but you get what you pay for with your time.

hagbardgroup3• 11 years ago

So, the reviews never happen without the marketing push.

The interplay between the marketing and the reviews are to help consumers decide if the vendor fulfilled their promises to the public. Critics with prestige will only review films that they anticipate will have an audience. The audience will go to the critics to see if they verify the sizzly promise from the trailer.

There is no demand for critical evaluation of a product without trying to generate that demand first through marketing and advertising. Try launching a product without doing any marketing at all and see what happens (absolutely nobody will buy your thing).

Different consumers care differing degrees on how much they want to research before they make a purchase.

Ask an indie film director how unimportant promotion and hustling are to actually getting people to see a movie.

Yelp and all crowdsourced reviews that don't even try to verify purchasing are easily scammed and gamed at scale.

Similarly, reviewing on Youtube -- especially for things like games and children's toys -- is rife with concealed bribery for influence -- illegal in the US. This stuff is harder to 'disrupt' than it seems.

But this doesn't scale to huge cities with tens, hundreds or thousands of choices. We can't know the reputation of such a wide array, and we can easily be fooled by advertising. Internet-based recommendation systems make the grapevine and reputation scalable. I hope we see more innovation. Yelp is a start, but it fails miserably because if I rate a place 5 because I love very authentic Thai food, and another person rates it a 1 because they are used to Americanized Thai, the restaurant gets a 3 (I'm simplifying for illustrative purposes). In other words, Yelp's rating is useless to both me and the other person.

What happens is that people in cities tend to pick a small number of vendors that they trust based on repeated positive trading interactions. They might decide to test out different vendors if they receive a sufficiently enticing offer.

Yelp is not terribly good and doesn't even make money. This is also kind of a non-problem in search of a solution: people will evaluate restaurants based on peer evaluations, their own experience, professional critics, and crowd reviews. The kind of people who make judgments based on crowd reviews might just want to be with the popular crowd rather than quality. What crowd reviews tell you is what's popular -- since you don't have a sense of the personality and knowledge level of each amateur critic, each individual review carries little weight.

So for example, most Yelpers would freak out at the 'slow service' of a super-high-end restaurant because they're tasteless scenesters. If you want to know what the herd of mindless scenesters think is hot right now, Yelp'll tell you. Or in your Thai example.

taejo• 11 years ago

to think that advertising results in informed consumers makes little sense. I find it strange that a community of logic and science oriented people can hold such a notion.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair

Many people here on HN are paid by ads.

snowwrestler• 11 years ago

As you note, the idea of good/bad is often highly subjective.

If one baker is actually bad across the board, they will eventually go out of business.

But often what happens is segmentation: one restaurant meets the demand for authentic Thai, and one satisfies the demand for Americanized Thai. Which is "better"? It's in the eye of the beholder. Broad rating tools like Yelp end up illustrating the mix of opinions in the population, rather than an objective "good/bad" scale. If half of customers like authentic Thai, and half like Americanized, then both restaurants will have middling ratings given a random mix of customers.

This highlights the real purpose of advertising: to enable market segmentation. An action movie with a terrible plot and characters will emphasize the action in their marketing, to attract people who like action. Critics, who tend to prefer original stories and complex characters, might pan it--who cares? The people who read movie reviews are themselves only a segment of the market.

dec0dedab0de3• 11 years ago

I'm hoping for a future where recommendation systems and collaborative filtering get so good that they render marketing and advertising useless.

How can you recommend something you've never heard of?

Udik4• 11 years ago

The problem with Rotten Tomatoes is that - I suspect- the studios are perfectly able to influence the professional reviewers. Or, more probably, professional reviewers adjust their expectations and judgments on the type of movie they're reviewing. The end result is that every recent shiny pile-of-crap produced by Hollywood gets enthusiastic reviews and therefore excellent scores on RT.

Gravity: RT score 97%

2001 A Space Odissey: RT score 96%

The Martian: RT score 93%

Blade Runner: RT score 89%

If you're looking for an alternative, I use http://www.criticker.com. It calculates expected movie ratings based on your previous ratings, it's a much better way to decide what's worth seeing and what is not.

ciaranm• 11 years ago

I thought the Martian was excellent. You'll notice that the user-rated % is higher than the critics, at 94%.

From the video game aggregation space, you tend to see the type of thing you're suggesting (games that are big-budget-questionably-reviewed) have _much_ lower user-scores than critics. I would be surprised if user-rated movies was different.

animal531• 11 years ago

You select some odd movies to pick on. 2001 was a classic. Sure, for viewing it as a modern audience it has way too many issues to score anywhere near a 90, but for its time the score was more than warranted.

The Martian I haven't seen yet, but according to general consensus it seems to be pretty good.

Blade Runner is another classic, the fact that it didn't score in the 90's is surprising.

Some people didn't like Gravity at all, but I really did. I would easily have given it a 90 myself.

bcgraham• 11 years ago

RT's Tomatometer or Metacritic's Metascore are not measures of film worth as a kind of "atomic weight." Tomatometer, in particular, is a statement about how many reviewers gave a positive review, without regard to each reviewer's depth of feeling.

Imagine three movies:

First: 90% of reviewers gave 5/5, 10% of reviewers gave 1/5. Second: 90% of reviewers gave 3/5, 10% of reviewers gave 2/5. Third: 80% of reviewers gave 5/5, 20% of reviewers gave 1/5.

First movie: Almost all reviewers raved about the movie - it's probably good. Second movie: Not a single reviewer loved or hated it; it's probably pretty bland. Third movie: vast majority of reviewers loved it, and the rest hated it. It's not as sure a bet as the first, but all of the reviewers reacted strongly to it.

Would you rather see the second or third movie? I'd rather see the third. For example, is The Avengers (92%)[1] really a better executed, more worthwhile film than Cloud Atlas (66%)[2]?

Metacritic handles this a little better, because the reviewer score is weighted, not just a +1 or -1. However, it still has the problem of 90%/10% and 60%/40% both averaging to 50%.

No number-crunching, but I have a suspicion that studios are getting better and better about shotgunning out enough chum to different types of reviewers to effectively game those numbers, which is how you arrive at RT scores like those you present.

[1] http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/marvels_the_avengers/

[2] http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/cloud_atlas_2012/

Roger Ebert wrote about Cloud Atlas: "Surely this is one of the most ambitious films ever made. ... Anywhere you go where movie people gather, it will be discussed."

chrismcb2• 11 years ago

One thing to keep in mind is Rotten Tomatoes isn't a ranking. A movie that gets a 100% rating COULD be just a "good" movie, but not a perfect movie. 100% just means that every review consider it in a "positive" light. Not that every review thought it was the best movie ever made. The numbers can't really be compared to each other. Another thing to keep in mind is the number of reviewers. 2001 had 70, while Gravity had 306. 2001 had 3 "negative" reviews while Gravity had 10.

rm_-rf_slash4• 11 years ago

Hollywood has known what to do when they're selling shit for years: crank up the marketing to get as many people buying tickets as possible before word gets out that the film sucks.

As a result the costs of films go way up to the degree that we're pretty much stuck with Oscar bait tragic dramas or the same lukewarm franchises we've had shoved down our throats before we were old enough to chew.

philh• 11 years ago

Hollywood wants to make films that people want to watch. They might be able to trick people into going to the cinema before the reviews come out, if necessary. But that won't save it in home entertainment, which is where most of the money is.

They're pretty good at it, too. This year, Furious 7 and Jurassic World have been two of the top-grossing films ever. That's not because people were tricked into seeing them, and didn't know what they were in for. It's because people enjoyed watching those films.

pasbesoin• 11 years ago

So, the next trade deal after TPP will outlaw reviews, or "examining the internal functioning of entertainment products."

Sounds like a poor joke. With increasing efforts to e.g. DMCA excerpts, citations, and other forms of "fair use" -- not to mention the TPP et al. already apparently attempting to constrain and wipe out "fair use", I'm not sure it really is.

OSButler2• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

As someone who relies on online movie ratings (not Fandango), how do you choose movies then?

OSButler2• 11 years ago

I 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).

bhaumik2• 11 years ago

Note: Rotten Tomatoes is a property of Warner Bros, whose box office revenue was signficantly affected by the ratings last summer.

makeitsuckless• 11 years ago

Of 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• 11 years ago

for 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...

rconti2• 11 years ago

You 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.

cm2187• 11 years ago

What 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.

sohailk• 11 years ago

I think they're also affected by reruns on TV.

mehwoot• 11 years ago

Which feels like the ratings are manipulated during the marketing period.

I always assumed this was because the people most enthusiastic about a movie see it first, and then everybody else.

mehrzad• 11 years ago

The 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• 11 years ago

I wonder it it comes from programming languages which silently truncate the fraction part of a float when using it as an integer.

qznc• 11 years ago

It 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• 11 years ago

I 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.

mtarnovan• 11 years ago

I generally use this settings when looking for a movie on movieo.me: 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• 11 years ago

I usually don't trust on online movie ratings. The only platform that have some ratings similar with my tastes is Letterboxd: http://letterboxd.com

aleem• 11 years 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

SyneRyder• 11 years ago

Maybe 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

DonaldFisk• 11 years ago

This (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 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• 11 years ago

While 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• 11 years ago

Yeah, 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/ 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.

Udik4• 11 years ago

Try http://www.criticker.com

I've been using it for years, it's pretty good.

ownagefool• 11 years ago

Unless 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

k__• 11 years ago

My 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• 11 years ago

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/search/?search=transformers

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/search/?search=fast+and+furiou...

throwaway7767• 11 years ago

My 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• 11 years ago

That's exactly my experience. What's more, I find that people tend to rate a comedies more positively than movies from other genres.

Houshalter• 11 years ago

There 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• 11 years ago

Reminds 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

nitelord• 11 years ago

Fandango 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• 11 years ago

Hmmmm... I never took online reviews / ratings too seriously. Why would I bother about some random website?

Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings

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