@RustyShackleworth said:

I'm new to this board and I want to understand how the film ratings work here. My general impression is that the film ratings here are rather low

That's my impression too. 8.0 is really good for a movie with enough ratings and 8.5 is pretty much exceptional

@banana_girl said:

@RustyShackleworth said:

I'm new to this board and I want to understand how the film ratings work here. My general impression is that the film ratings here are rather low

That's my impression too. 8.0 is really good for a movie with enough ratings and 8.5 is pretty much exceptional

Are the ratings nothing more than the average of all those that have rated the film or TV show? Is there a minimum number of ratings needed?

You can't compare the rating system on TMDb to the "fresh" percentages on Rotten Tomatoes. That's a totally different system.

On here, Alien has a 77% (7.7/10), while on Rotten Tomatoes, the "audience score" rating is a 3.9/5 (7.8/10).

@outlawx said:

The ratings on imdb are doctored and sometimes flawed: Movies scoring big at the box office, pushed by top-1000/staff voters, us vs non-us etc. Just look at the imdb250 and compare in detail the user votes. So take them with caution, there and here ;)

I agree with this, IMDb's ratings have been manipulated by staff for a long time now.

Probably just fewer people voting which makes ratings skewed one way or the other, and the people coming are hardcore IMDB voters who are going to be more critical.

I'm wondering if the lower ratings for classics are a function of the raters being younger and, therefore, not rating these movies in the context of the times in which the movie was made? Not asserting this, just hazarding a guess. It would drive me nuts to see some new, brainless-blow-em-up movie (Transformers, ahem) getting higher ratings on IMDb than The Godfather, FFS. Might be nifty to break-down ratings by rater's age....

@Master_YODA said:

Good thing you can import your IMDB Ratings! So at least I helped a few of the movies above to get to a higher score.

How does one import IMDb ratings...??

On your account page, clock the "Import List" link. There's some info about how and where to export your list from there.

@travisbell said:

On your account page, clock the "Import List" link. There's some info about how and where to export your list from there.

Cool. Just completed the import, nice!

WRT low ratings, yes, our users have historically voted lower than what you see on IMDb and the (critics) rating on RT. You'll start to see more alignment with the RT user rating.

But a lot of it is the demographic, which you guys mentioned. Our users are typically more critical in nature I think (it's the kind of person a user editable database would attract). Over the years though, this has slowly been changing. It used to be 10% of our users were editors, before the IMDb thing it was less than 1% and now it's probably less than a half of a percent.

@travisbell said:

WRT low ratings, yes, our users have historically voted lower than what you see on IMDb and the (critics) rating on RT. You'll start to see more alignment with the RT user rating.

But a lot of it is the demographic, which you guys mentioned. Our users are typically more critical in nature I think (it's the kind of person a user editable database would attract). Over the years though, this has slowly been changing. It used to be 10% of our users were editors, before the IMDb thing it was less than 1% and now it's probably less than a half of a percent.

Nice little way to sneak in how much the TMDB population has grown! Is there an arbitrary threshold number you would pick to say that the influx of new accounts was an unqualified success, 1000, 2000?

@travisbell said:

On your account page, clock the "Import List" link. There's some info about how and where to export your list from there.

So when you import your ratings from IMDB, they automatically count them here? How is that?

Also, how do you rate movies on here when you visit their pages? Maybe it's the phone app I'm on, but there doesn't appear to be a way. When I click the rating, nothing happens..

So when you import your ratings from IMDB, they automatically count them here? How is that?

The exported lost you get from IMDb contains a list of ids alongside your rating. We map those ids to our ids and then create the ratings on our end. In the end you get (almost) all your ratings here.

Also, how do you rate movies on here when you visit their pages?

Click the star on the bottom button bar (far right). All if your account actions are on the bottom bar.

I think the age of the people here might be a little older, and skew towards your more dedicated movie fans. They're probably tougher critics, less likely to hand out tens. I only give a movie a nine or a ten if I consider it a classic.

Kids will tend to give anything they enjoy a ten.

7 is not decent to me. 6 is decent, okay, nice. 7 is good. 8 is great. 9 is WOW, amazing, love. 10 is perfection <3

I'm strict? xD