Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
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-...
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.
To put it another way, I like good movies, but have an unreasonable fondness for zombie movies, and a fabulous hatred for Goodwill Hunting, PI, and the Big Bang Theory my perception of their failure to accurately represent my area (although Chuck is fine). If I were writing reviews, I'd have to cut back on my weird personal biases to make them marketable and useful.
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/
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.
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>
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.
Before that it was sneaking a last call order of Chinese mall court takeout with my friends in high school into the theater on a quiet Sunday evening when nobody was around or bothered to check our backpacks. We sat in the back and enjoyed the film and our food that cost half and filled us twice what we'd pay for at the concessions stand.
Theaters suck now. The real mystery of plummeting profits is how thick in denial theater owners are.
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.
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.
I find myself very often in the situation were I hear/learn about a new cool thing, and I want it absolutely right now (The last example was a colleague bringing an Oculus to work, I almost ordered one the spot)
However, I try to wait a bit before actually buying anything big (like one/two weeks), and I find that most of the time I don't actually need/care about the product I was so hyped about.
This is one of the part that annoy me the most about advertising, especially if it is well targeted : It creates a new need and offers (sells) its solution, more than it helps me to fulfill a real need.
"We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra."
– Tyler Durden, Fight Club
(Swap out a few of the products in the second quote for gadgets, cars and porn to make it better fit the HN demographic.)
If you haven't seen the BBC documentary "Century of the Self," I highly recommend it.
If you mean "your business or life had a critical problem that could only be fixed by this tool", then no.
If you mean "your business or life could be significantly impacted and improved by this tool", then yes.
I almost never impulse-buy, FYI.
Yes. As a mater of fact, a prime example from earlier this week--I live in an area with very active clays and we've had a serious drought this year which has shifted foundations around like crazy--whatever, that's what active clays do and you learn to live with it. But the annoying part is doors that stick or won't close or closets that won't open. So, I fixed a few last weekend by putting spacers behind hinges and moved some strike plates around and was getting ready to learn how to plane the doors that couldn't be fixed that way and for the first time and I saw an advertisement for an "adjustable door hinge". Whoa. best. idea. ever. Test batch is in the mail and I have high hopes. Why on earth these things aren't stocked in the local Lowe's or Home Depot is beyond my comprehension.
And we can move away from a web, roadsides, subway cars, buses, everything littered with ads. We can have a web and newspapers or television news that don't put out junk to increase page-views or tv views using any means necessary (e.g. click bait, sensationalistic junk "news" "reports", etc).
We won't have children being programmed to want more and more stuff.
I could go on and on.
Private roads have no ads. Expensive neighborhoods have no ads. You won't see many ads on Park Avenue in Manhattan.
Expensive HOAs ban lawn signs. You can pay extra for the ad-free Kindle from Amazon. If you buy books, the books are ad-free. Expensive newsletters are ad-free. Pay per view movies are ad-free (except when they have products inserted surreptitiously into the content on behalf of advertisers).
Are you seeing the pattern, here? You get to pick two from this set: cheap, good, fast. If it's cheap and fast, it'll be bad. If it's good and cheap, it'll take a long time. If it's fast and good, it won't be cheap.
Plenty of people -- the majority, really -- want lower prices in return for submitting to brain-scrambling.
Not to mention it is utter bullshit that ads make things cheaper or free: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773. So much for your "pattern".
EDIT (since I can't reply to hagbardgroup at this thread depth): You didn't really read the link and the argument why it doesn't make anything free or cheaper (think about where the advertisers get their money that they pay Facebook), in fact the opposite. Ok, here is the same argument in different words: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237
I don't get it how your statement about Facebook's customers not being the users isn't consistent with the idea that it's 'free.'
Everything costs resources. Facebook isn't 'free.' You use Facebook in return for allowing Facebook to spy on you on behalf of their customers, and give those customers chances to influence you through various forms of media.
There are plenty of communications alternatives which are more private and expensive. Phone companies offer various tiers of paid service. There are tons of messaging apps that permit you to mass message people. You can send electronic mail to anyone in the world. Whoa! So many options!
Facebook is pure frippery, and most people's lives can be improved by quitting the service in the same way that unsubscribing from Publisher's Clearinghouse improves people's lives.
However, plenty of people are willing to give up their attention in return for low price entertainment. People can go to the movie theater for $10, or they can spend two hours clicking Buzzfeed for $0 and two hours. Advertisers pay Buzzfeed's bills so they can remind those readers to buy more tacos from Taco Bell. It costs the advertiser maybe $0.03 per page view for that user owing to Buzzfeed's excellent rates -- so a cool $0.60 for a 20-listicle binge.
The readers spent two hours, but plenty of people are willing to make that trade. Others aren't.
Free web services need advertisers way, way, way, way more than advertisers need those free services. If those web services can no longer provide value to advertisers, then those web services will need to start charging users rather than advertisers to fund the service. Else, you can lobby the government to fund GovernmentBook -- hopefully with co-located servers in that Utah data farm. Then, taxpayers will pay for a continually degrading monopoly service, and you'll get government ads instead of commercial ones. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Personally, I find a far greater percentage of useful products through word-of-mouth. If I hear about something new, it has to be good enough to survive the 'telephone game' of getting the information to me, which means I'll have a preference for very good or very local products.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
How can you recommend something you've never heard of?
So how do you bootstrap your good product into the grapevine? A variety of ways, depending on what it is. Sending samples to reviewers. Announcements on relevant websites (such as HN). Making it available in catalogs and product search engines (Amazon, an app store, Etsy, Orbitz, etc) where people will encounter it in search results.
Aren't those all forms of advertising?
I don't think people have a problem with getting information about products when they deliberately look for that.
Imagine if HN had a link at the top for advertisements, and they had a policy that anyone with > x amount of karma could pay $y to have a listing for z days. It would be reminiscent of the ad's in the back of old computer magazines, with people selling home made software, tools, and services.
Another example, would be if a music venue paid local record shops to have a prominent display of upcoming shows in their store, and on their website. How could that be anything but useful?
Honestly, I'm not selling anything, and I avoid ad's as much as possible. I even signed up for the ad free Hulu just to put my money where my mouth was, after ranting to friends about how I would never pay for something that came with commercials. I just think that a wholesale attack against the idea of advertising is shortsighted.
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.
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.
As for the video games space, well, I don't know it enough. But I suppose you could argue that video games are different from movies in that they require a much higher level of engagement, both in terms of time and concentration - not to mention the monetary investment. So it is reasonable that they are evaluated more thoroughly by their users and that whatever hype surrounds them has a lower impact of their final rating.
Although I would rate Blade Runner higher than the martian. Your mileage may vary, one size does not fit all etc etc.
It would be one thing if this were just one book, you might argue those are just those particular characters. But it's a theme across his books, one that thankfully often gets removed or toned down in the movie adaptations. PKD is a misogynist. He is the author who changed my mind about how misogyny works and just how pervasive it actually is.
In Blade Runner's case, "Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep" is not a coherent book. Blade Runner went a long way towards improving the cohesiveness of the plot, even regarding the ambiguous components: they are intentionally ambiguous now. The action scenes that Deckard practically walks through in the book have real impact and danger in the movie. And Ridley Scott thankfully just killed Deckard's wife off completely, making her a symbol of nostalgia and mourning, rather than contempt. Oh, and they completely skipped the weird religious VR experience sub-plot that never amounted to anything in the book anyway.
I think it's easy to miss how much general improvement there's been in moviemaking. I accompanied my mother to see The Transporter Refuelled a few weeks ago, and by 2015 standards it's dreck. But at the same time I was amazed by how polished everything was; the pacing, the movement, even the terrible dialogue was only terrible because it was doing clunky exposition. In some ways it was better than a good film from 20 years ago, and compared to a bad old film like say Armed and Dangerous it was night and day.
At least, not on HN. However, would you put The Martian almost on par with 2001? Would you rate it more than Blade Runner? I wouldn't do either, no way.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
I came away from it thinking that if I hadn't read the Silo Saga, I might possibly have actually enjoyed Snowpiercer, though definitely nowhere near 95%'s worth.
There were a LOT of copied ideas. Perhaps none of them were original to Wool, but Wool was not (to my knowledge) as much a clone of any individual work as it was the compilation of a lot of tropes.
There are a lot of very interesting themes in the story though, the action is well done, the production quality is high, and the movie pays homage in tone and style to other great movies. When a movie's technobabble is terrible, it helps to pretend it's fantasy. If you don't and you let bad science get you down you could miss out on the other parts.
That said, it is very well produced and if you can set aside the technology aspect of it I would say it's among the better sci-fi movies in recent memory.
The point is though that this is a question of taste. Maybe my tastes simply aren't aligned with what a lot of other people like. But it is for that reason that I simply don't trust RT. For many things I used to use Ebert, since I could usually predict from his review wether I'd like it.
(I havent looked closely but I do wonder if selection bias impacts review sites. If a limited appeal movie comes out, and the mainstream reviewers ignore it, and all the reviewers that RT aggregates are from the world that the move does appeal to, does it end up scoring much better than if all the mainstream usual suspects had reviewed it.)
Turgid nonsense. I couldn't watch past the first half hour. If I'd paid to see that at the movies I'd have been properly angry.
Though maybe I was blinded by the nonsense, to a wonderland of interesting screencraft. But I don't think so.
There's also arguments to be made about the philosophical message of Snowpiercer, but I don't think that's particularly relevant to why the movie is great (though obviously others disagree).
The cinematography required new innovations in ways to film space scenes. New rigs and such they invented that stuff on the production budget. The acting was top notch. It was stunning.
The cheesy stuff? The unrealistic parts of it? Maybe you could criticise those aspects of it, but they were intentional sacrifices made so the rest of the film could be fresh, new, attainable. The story arc was like a mini rollercoaster, never slowed down. I cheered for our protagonist.
Movies like that don't come out very often.
It's a borderline masterpiece my dear friend. A masterpiece I tell you. One of the prettiest looking things I've ever seen in Imax. It made me have feelings inside. I rated it as one of the best movies to come out in decades.
I think part of a film like that is the spectacle of it. It's probably harder to enjoy on a cellphone, is that what happened?
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.
I miss David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz.
Something to bear in mind is that a slight above mediocre film can have a 100% rating if it has wide appeal.
I personally find that there are less misfires on a good Metacritic score.
The user comparison view also shows you what the other user has seen and you haven't. Great once you trust the user to discover new movies.
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.
"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."
[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."
I'm not suggesting it was the best movie of the year, by any stretch, but where the reviewer kept insisting that the alleged plot holes were completely unexplainable, I found that perhaps she just didn't "Get It", because not only were the holes absent from my viewing, but where she found holes, I found explanations that actually made sense (y'know, within the context of a film anyway).
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.
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.
I never found it that big a deal, mildly distracting at best, but I can understand where it turns off others. Seems the design decision for gains in immersion(?) caused a larger tradeoff in readability.
Some of his posts do recommend convertcase.net at the top, though that requires copy-pasting to a separate tab. They would really be better off enabling it themselves with a script + html button, imo.
article {
text-transform: lowercase
}http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/ http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-trek/ http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/other-movies/
[1]https://twitter.com/benfraserlee/status/641368752798306304
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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'.
Yes, he is: the insult lies in the use of the `pretentious', 'artsy' and 'pedantic' word and the condescending tone regarding non-Hollywood movie.
What if I told you a lot of people find Transformers: Dark of the Moon as pretentious and vapid as its title is ?
One more thing ™: s/stoke my ego/make my brain sings
Then I guess I'd say "yeah, probably"? I haven't seen any of the Transformers movies past the first one myself, but I hear they're pretty shit.
By assuming that watching "hipster movies" makes you intellectual, you've illustrated exactly my point, that (some) people watch these movies because they think it somehow makes them into intellectuals, which fits the definition of pretentious quite well.
Also note, pertaining to pretentiousness, that pretending to be an "intellectual" by category or style doesn't change one's IQ by even a little.
Don't reverse the role, you are the one stating and assuming that people watching movies you don't enjoy are stoking their ego and you are the one who came up with the hipstometer word:
> 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).
> By assuming that watching "hipster movies" makes you intellectual, you've illustrated exactly my point,
Really, what a weird line of reasoning. I never wrote that and you can't conclude that's my opinion from anything I wrote because I never qualified any movies as `hipster movies' (while you did).
> that (some) people watch these movies because they think it somehow makes them into intellectuals, which fits the definition of pretentious quite well.
Likewise you seem to put yourself above them by not watching them and being a real intellectual while they would be frauds. Yeah, not pretentious at all.
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.
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.
I've been using it for years, it's pretty good.
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
* 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.)
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.
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.
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.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.
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).
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.
I always assumed this was because the people most enthusiastic about a movie see it first, and then everybody else.
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.
The problem happens when bad things are rated better than good things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s19e04-youre-not-yelpi...
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.
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...
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...
As for calling Ebert himself an idiot the man had seen pretty much every movie that deserves acclaim so it's silly to think he doesn't have a huge library to compare to or isn't qualified to talk about film. He even kept reviewing after having his lower jaw removed because of cancer. The only reason I'd call him an "idiot's reviewer" is because he never bothered with pretentiousness or overanalysis in his reviews.
A film critic should aspire to do more. He should be critical and hopeful educate the audience on some level. Ebert's reviews were more like restaurant reviews.