Comments on: IMDb Movie Ratings Over the Years

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!

By: holliday

holliday — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:38:55 +0000

I think the reason that we have an increase in ratings over the last 10 years is simply to do with kids/younger generation now having regular access IMDb. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that most under 18s are going to be less critical (on average) than adults.

By: Benito Frito

Benito Frito — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:22:05 +0000

Have you noticed how many of the “worst” column were on Mystery Science Theater 3000?

Yeah, so did I (:

By: Anrkist

Anrkist — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:05:18 +0000

@Badman – I don’t know anyone who doesn’t use IMDB for movie information. It’s not geared towards geeks… it’s geared toward people who enjoy movies.

By: Riitta

Riitta — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:10:59 +0000

Thank you for very interesting statistics! And clear & cool graphs.

By: Badman

Badman — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 15:00:38 +0000

bear in mind IMDB is not the opinion of the general public but just the pretty hardcore computer geeks who would log in and vote – see The Dark Knight for proof of this

By: Nathaniel

Nathaniel — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 14:27:08 +0000

@CapnCrunch91 - IMDb makes their database public and available for download: http://www.imdb.com/interfaces @You’re wrong. and tabris chen - IMDb uses two different scores for a movie. I was using the raw score, not the adjusted top 250 score. Both Up and Inglourious Basterds have an 8.6 raw score (not 8.5), but I.B. won out a few decimal places down the line. I'm a big Pixar fan too (WallE is one of my favourite movies), but I don't have an agenda here -- I'm just going by the numbers. @Scott - I'm curious about that too. Of course, on the flip side, there are many people who give a rank of 1 to a movie even if they only mildly disliked it if it's ranked higher than they think it should be. It's too bad that so many people vote to adjust the ranking rather than vote to give their opinion. @MWF - That's actually a really good idea, as it gets us (mostly) around the problem of the huge bias in the 1950's. There's enough data to include the best 40 or so titles from each year, so that might be fun to look at.

By: MWF

MWF — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 14:06:05 +0000

What about the average rating of the top ten movies per year? Or choosing the top N movies as a function of the number of movies created that year? It might give you a better understanding of how movies evolve over time, since most people only watch a few of the best movies every year anyways.

Reminds me of

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/another-way-to-look-at-free-throw-percentage/