Comments on: IMDb Movie Ratings Over the Years

By: George Johnson

George Johnson — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 20:44:19 +0000

You should also note that there was a concentrated effort by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) fanclub (the Usenet group rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc — check the GOOGLE GROUPS archive with the and use rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc and “imdb” + “vote” to find relevant discussion threads) to “bad list” every original movie that got the MST3K delightful value-improving mockery treatment (to diminsh costs of using the original movie’s licensing rights) back in 1996 and the campaign to “bad list” by voting waves kept slowly going up to 2001.

It kind of worked given that the named movies did hit the “Worst 100 Films” list, but did not drop the costs of the licensing rights for the movies. Realistically the campaign should’ve been using the “Your movies are lapsing into welcome obscurity, use MST3K to act as a joy-creating sales platform to keep your flicks in circulation.” Alas, this was not clued upon until much later in the rerelease marketing cycle.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 19:23:56 +0000

Its funny how Kubrick has 2 of the best movies, the Killing and Dr Strangelove as well as 1 worst movie, The Flying Padre, a documentary about a airplane flying minister. This “movie” is definitely not the worst movie of the year, but the 1000 votes rule makes it the only mediocre movie to be voted for over 1000 times as the only people who will have seen this since IMDB was set up will be Kubrick obsessives like myself.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 22:16:23 +0000

It is good to see this data and analysis. When I downloaded the data file, I looked at the variance and noticed the variance for past year data was smaller, but with more variations. The variance for more recent years is larger with less variations. I would suggest that this too is a matter of the sampling for older movies. If the data is statistically significant for the older movies, one explanation could be that more movie aficionados are rating older movies, while a more general population is evaluating newer movies. Another factor could be the vote limit rule, which would select for those films which have larger audiences. This would make older, poorer films show up less in the data, and furthermore would be selective of the better films with higher ratings with less rating variance.

By: J

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 06:48:52 +0000

I was under the impression “Kiwi!” was just a run of the mill youtube video. From the description – “My Master’s Thesis Animation, which I completed while I was at The School of Visual Arts, MFA Computer Art, in New York City.”

By: Justin Snyder

Justin Snyder — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:52:36 +0000

Hi Nathaniel – great study! thanks for sharing.

Have you ever looked at the relation between the ratings of films and their box office returns? I would be curious to see a study like that.

By: Kathryn

Kathryn — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:19:34 +0000

Wow! You are so cool!