
Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings - thehoff
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fandango-movies-ratings/
======
bostik
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-...](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/summer-box-office-how-
movie-819250)

~~~
eevilspock
_> 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.

~~~
thenomad
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.

~~~
Majestic121
Did you actually have a need for those products before hearing about them?

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.

~~~
fluidcruft
> Did you actually have a need for those products before hearing about them?

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.

~~~
eevilspock
Ran into? That's not an argument for ads. That's an argument for serendipity.
We don't need ads for chance encounters of things that might be useful. You
run across them when you visit someone's house, or a friend tells you about
something great, or someone here on HN mentions it. Or maybe you do a web
search and it comes up as a recommended alternative to planing doors. All of
these are better than ads because the source does not have a conflict of
interest, an incentive to deceive.

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.

~~~
hagbardgroup
Yes, we can.

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.

~~~
eevilspock
So, a two class system. The poor get by (taken advantage of is more like it)
by submitting to "brain-scrambling". The rich get rich thorough said brain-
scrambling. Excellent!

Not to mention it is utter bullshit that ads make things cheaper or free:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237)

~~~
hagbardgroup
It does make things cheaper -- whether in time or money.

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.

------
abruzzi
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.

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

~~~
abruzzi
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.)

~~~
bmelton
Snowpiercer was indeed sad, but I always assumed my negativity towards it was
a result of having already read Hugh Howey's (rather good) Silo Saga, which it
seemed to rip off at every turn, only having shifted the X and Y axes.

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.

~~~
lemevi
I found the first half of Wool to be very good and the rest of it readable,
although just barely so. Howey is a terrible writer with interesting plot
ideas. Howey has a compulsion to explicitly tell you in minute details through
every other passage exactly what is on everyone's mind. The concept of using
symbolism and actions to portray people seems lost to him. His sentence
structure is terrible. He's saved by Wool's very interesting idea and the
first chapter of Wool was admittedly very good. I read the entire series and I
really think at a high level his ideas a very interesting, but he just doesn't
really have the skill required to write well. I am not sure an editor would
help, maybe a co-author.

~~~
lmm
I think you have it backwards. The ideas of Wool are so common in prior
science fiction that authors would take them for granted, play with them. The
plot is pretty much that of The Penultimate Truth. Howey succeeded because,
for whatever reason, people liked his writing or he details of his version
more than previous iterations of the idea.

~~~
bmelton
Very possible. Not suggesting that Wool was entirely unique, but more
specifically, that Snowpiercer seemed to have taken the entire idea of Wool
and just shifted the axis from vertical to horizontal.

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.

------
raspasov
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."

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
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
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](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."

~~~
bmelton
I generally feel the same, but was woefully misled by a detailed, thorough,
but overall negative review of "Spring[1]", which I found to be a delightful
genre-bending tale that really surprised me.

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).

[1] -
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3395184/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3395184/)

------
jaynos
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](https://twitter.com/benfraserlee/status/641368752798306304)

------
ripberge
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
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.

------
intopieces
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.

~~~
curun1r
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
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.

------
mindcrime
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.

~~~
mrob
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.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
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_.

~~~
mrob
Note that "funniest movie" isn't the same as "best comedy". It's merely the
one that made me laugh the most. That's a very important attribute for judging
comedy, but not the only one. Taking all aspects into account (how much I
laughed, acting, memorable lines, cultural impact, cinematography, etc.) I
would rate Ghostbusters as best.

------
nitelord
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.

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

~~~
a_bonobo
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.

------
SyneRyder
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](https://movielens.org)

~~~
DonaldFisk
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](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.

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

------
mangeletti
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).

~~~
johnchristopher
> 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'.

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

~~~
johnchristopher
I don't think so. Moreover dismissing an entire group of people (hipsterism ?
really ?) by stating that watching and enjoying movies one doesn't like is
akin to stoking one's ego and that such movies are pretentious seems way
more... well... dismissive and absolute to me. Because, believe it or not,
some people truly enjoy the movies he doesn't enjoy and it has nothing to do
with ego. This is objectively anti-intellectualism.

~~~
mangeletti
My comment isn't intended to be anti-anything. I spend 10-15 hours per week
studying philosophy, history, economics, ontology, physics (a little), and
biology, even if it is largely via Wikipedia. I'm certainly not anti-
intellectual.

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.

~~~
johnchristopher
> 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.

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.

------
pmcpinto
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](http://letterboxd.com)

------
downandout
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
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/](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.

~~~
Udik
Try [http://www.criticker.com](http://www.criticker.com)

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

------
graeme
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
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.

~~~
graeme
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](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.

------
Sukotto
I really like the hobby(?) project [http://www.phi-
phenomenon.org/](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.

~~~
bhaumik
Looks interesting, too bad they stopped after 2012.

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

~~~
OSButler
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).

------
aleem
> 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect)

------
cm2187
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.

~~~
mehwoot
_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.

------
Houshalter
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.

------
InclinedPlane
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
Skewed absolute rating is not a problem at all.

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

------
grecy
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.

------
greggman
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
I generally use this settings when looking for a movie on movieo.me:
[http://imgur.com/X4xsXaX](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.

------
k__
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.

~~~
throwaway7767
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.

------
qznc
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.

------
vidoc
I'm even more cautious about yelp ratings!

~~~
nathancahill
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
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)

------
Steko
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.

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

------
makeitsuckless
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
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...

~~~
rconti
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.

~~~
bluedino
There are a ton of 4, 5, and 6 rated movies. I use IMDb at the video store and
won't pickup anything that isn't at least a mid-6.

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

------
stefek99
Hmmmm... I never took online reviews / ratings too seriously. Why would I
bother about some random website?

------
platz
Metacritic

~~~
afterburner
or look at the average rating in RT

------
a8da6b0c91d
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
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.ew.com/article/2014/01/13/armond-white-kicked-out-of-ny-
critics)

[http://www.avclub.com/article/armond-white-claims-he-was-
kic...](http://www.avclub.com/article/armond-white-claims-he-was-kicked-off-
rotten-tomat-65156)

[http://www.slashfilm.com/armond-white-prevents-toy-
story-3-f...](http://www.slashfilm.com/armond-white-prevents-toy-story-3-from-
becoming-the-best-reviewed-movie-of-all-time/)

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
Ebert was an idiot and an idiot's reviewer.

~~~
cooper12
It's interesting that you bring up Ebert because I would apply your original
comment to him. Ebert is spot on about the redeeming qualities of many films,
but in retrospect he focuses a lot on the positives. I don't think this is due
to him appealing to the "idiot masses", but rather it's a product of how he
views film. No matter which review I've read, the only impression of Ebert
I've had is of someone who loves film and its ability to convey the human
spirit.

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.

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
What Ebert did for the most part was accurately say whether or not the masses
would find a film enjoyable. He was very good at his job.

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.

------
raykaye47
I had no idea Fandango was owned by NBC. I will never buy tickets there now

