Interesting take on the ratings for The Interview: Are the movie ratings accurate? Aaron Ellis (Aaron Ellis has seen 240 of the IMDB Top 250) 1.3k upvotes by Edwin Khoo, Raf Cyran, Melissa Stroud, (more) Not anymore. If you need a shining example of why, take a look at the recent phenomenon that is The Interview. Before the movie was ever even released, The Interview had a whopping 9.9 on IMDB. And this wasnt on some piddly number of ratings. When I first checked the site, it had been rated by over 30,000 users. The Interview Has An Almost Perfect Rating On IMDb How did this happen? An anonymous user on 4chan recommended that people rush to IMDB and give The Interview a perfect 10 rating as a show of protest. Tens of thousands of people complied. Without having seen the movie, they gave it a perfect score. I saw The Interview on Christmas, and Im here to tell you that its not a 9.9 movie. Its not even a 6.9 movie. I rated it a 5, and that felt generous. It mostly feels like James Franco and Seth Rogen are just riffing on each other and improvising, with Randall Park occasionally doing the same. As more people have watched and rated the film, its rating has slowly tumbled down. As of earlier today, the rating is an 8.4 on 70,000 users. But that rating is still absurdly high. Long term, the movie will likely end with a score half- to a whole-point higher than it should be just because of this initial rating based on blind hype. Judging by the demographic breakdown from earlier, the users giving it the highest ratings were mostly young, which is consistent with 4chan. This whole fiasco has revealed the flaws of IMDB that many longtime users already knew. Blind Bias - Many users - particularly the youngsters - give movies high ratings before they have even seen a film. This is supposedly a show of fandom or loyalty. Extreme Inflation - User ratings on IMDB are always much higher than user and critical ratings on most other sites. Hype Ratings - Its rare that movie ratings on IMDB rise over time. Instead, the ratings usually plummet. Why? Because the people who initially rush out to see the movie in theaters are usually the hardcore fans who buy into the hype and then give it high ratings, regardless of quality. In the later weeks and months when everyone else in the moviegoing public watches it (after the hype has settled), the ratings normalize. But this means that in a films initial months, the early ratings are utterly useless because theyre terribly inflated. Fanboy Bias - Sci-fi, fantasy and comic fanboys and fangirls have made IMDB completely unreliable for any movie in those genres. Everything automatically gets a boosted score. Everything. IMDB has made attempts to block reviews and ratings on movies that havent yet been released, but they occasionally fail. Even if they do clean up this problem, they still have the issues of biased voting and extreme inflation. Ten to fifteen years ago, IMDB used to be reliable. Back then, very few movies had a rating over an 8.0, including some of the top-rated classics. But nowadays, the ratings all around are impossibly high. I recommend IMDB for discovering films from previous decades and some foreign films, but when it comes to anything released recently, you should use another site.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 04:18:27 +0000
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