Useless IMDB ratings
There was a time when the IMDB movie ratings were, well, maybe not reliable, but at least useful. You could glance quickly at the rating for a film and decide whether it was worth watching or not. Generally, my floor has been around 6.5. That might sound a bit low, but I watch a lot of movies and there are a few gems at around 6.5. Unrelated: I took a gamble the other day with The X Files: I Want to Believe, which was rated 6.3. Turns out it was more like a 5.0.
During the last few years, something has gone awfully wrong with the ratings. I don’t know if they have updated their algorithm or if IMDB is the victim of “rating spam” or whatever, but some of the ratings are completely off the wall. Just have a look at the IMDB Top 250.
The latest Batman movie is the third greatest movie ever? Give me a break. It was a good flick, but anything above 8.0 is ridiculous.
All three Lord of the Rings movies are in the top 30? Jesus Christ! I fell asleep in at least two of them.
Iron Man is rated 8.1?! More like 6.1.
What’s Sin City doing in the top 250?
And last but definitely not least, what the hell is Blade Runner doing at #103? It should be at least in the top 20. People actually think Braveheart is better than Blade Runner?
8 comments
Because people are morons and not critics – but I must say that Lord of the Rings and especially Sin City is a great cinematic experience. They deserve their place. Sin City should maybe even be even higher up.
The superhero-craze has gone to far though. I agree with you on that.
While I agree that the Lord of the Rings movies and Sin City were great cinematic experiences, that’s just one aspect of a good movie. Just being pretty isn’t enough.
Besides the general “bad taste of the crowd”, the “average” ratings seem to me incorrect because a very few fans of one movie may pull it up by their several high votes.
It seems to me more correct a -10 to +10 system and the resulting rating should be a simple sum of all the votes. So the high score will really be an achievement. Referring to IMDB the movie rating should be SUM(vote – 5.5).
Blade Runner will rise again then :-)
Lets hope so :)
I have a sneaking suspicion that interested parties drive up the ratings at IMBD. If you look at ratings’ breakdowns there’s just too many 10s to be realistic. As I know companies employ people to effect other opinions on the net it seems reasonable that people in the employ of production companies are bending the numbers. While I use IMDB to scan the specs of a film I trust Rotten Tomatoes or Yahoo Movies more for the ratings.
only the people who rate on a normal basis count for the top 250. If anything your wrong because certain movies are rated by tens to hundreds of thousands…thats like not agreeing with everybody. you lost
i believe there might be two reasons for such unnatural ratings..
1. the increase in the social marketing( people actually pay for increasing the brand image and public talk in social networking forums(myspace, facebook etc).. so why not imdb)
2. casual movie reviewers rate their favourite movie 10 or close to that.( it is very unlikely that they think twise about relative rating as in.. 10 being the best movie ever and so on )
comes down to personal taste, personally I loved Sin City. I think ratings may have a boost during the screening stage because people that enjoyed it will rate it right away but this is usually scaled down in the later stages IMO.