The validity of movie rating systems

I hope everyone knows you can’t trust any statistics someone gives you if they’re trying to sell you something. Whether it’s the criminally inaccurate graphs that frequent a FOX News story or “4 out of 5 dentists” recommend Brand X toothpaste. Numbers don’t lie, but people… They lie all the time by manipulating those numbers.

The blog FiveThirtyEight recently exposed how Fandango’s movie ratings are skewed compared to everyone else’s ratings. The highlights of the FiveThirtyEight article is that Fandango rounds their ratings up to the nearest half-star. So a movie with 4.01 stars becomes a 4.5, and so on. The primary difference between Fandango and everyone else is that Fandango is trying to sell you a movie ticket. Something to keep in mind.

I’ve done my own movie rating analysis of movie franchises using numbers from IMDb and RottenTomatoes. Taking into account hundreds of movies there is remarkable agreement between the two rating systems.

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I don’t think it’s any surprise that critics score movies lower on average. I think it’s part of the job description for being a movie critic. 🙂

Here at RunPee we have our own movie rating system: The Peeple’s Poll. Our poll is only about 2 years old so we have far less data than the others, but we make up for it in accuracy. We give you not only the overall rating of a movie but also break it down by your gender and age group.

We’re just getting started

In case you didn’t know my wife and I are in the process of rebuilding the RunPee app from scratch using a new programming language/framework: Google Flutter. In the process we’re refining the movie rating system and will apply machine learning algorithms to the data so that we can suggest new movies to you that you haven’t seen. This isn’t much different than what NetFlix does, except we’ll do it for recent releases so you can better decide which movies to see in the theater and which to wait for the DVD/Netflix.