Movie Ratings

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I don't understand what it means if a movie is rated 3.7/5. Is there some complex mathematical equation to this, or what? I believe a movie is either good or it is either bad, nothing in between.

Anyone else confused about this?

Where are you looking? For me, it would mean fairly good and quite entertaining.

I just mean in general, ratings that are in between 1 and 5. Maybe it's because I am terrible at gray areas.

The closer to 1 it is, the worse it is. The closer to 5 it is, the better it is.

So, a movie can only be two thirds good, or perhaps one third good? That makes little sense. Why not say 'this movie is good' or 'this movie is bad'?

There are general scales for film ratings:

* Awful
** Poor
*** Average
**** Good
***** Excellent

Does that make it easier to understand? So a film of rated nearly ****/***** would be fairly good.

I think what you think about it is a temporary perception problem. Sometimes things doesnt make sense to me as well. I get stuck and find myself trying to analyse and build theories about it =) The solution is simply forgetting about it for a while (usually 2-3 mins). After that you will have a fresh and raw mind.

Simple explanation for your current problem:


Gigli = 1/5;
Back to the future = 5/5;

Then Iron man 2 should be between 1 and 5, like 3.

It's not that the movie is two thirds good or one-thirds good.

It's that there is a spectrum of movie quality. That quality is subjective. For example, an online friend gave Transformers five out of five stars, meaning that on her spectrum of movie value, movies can't get any better than Transformers. I, on the other hand, gave Transformers three out of five stars, meaning I like it better than about half the movies out there but not as much as about half the movies out there. The number of stars is not a discrete count, it is a relative value.

Then the site that keeps track of the stars averages out everyone's personal assessments of quality. If only my friend and I voted on Transformers, the site would say it had four out of five stars because the average of three and five is four. This is how a site can have something like 3.75 because averages don't always come out to whole numbers.

Once hundreds of people vote on a film, the average starts to have some meaning -- if a film has two stars, it's probably not that good but might be watchable if it's a genre and subject someone tends to like. If a film has 4.9 stars, it's probably terrific and destined to be a classic (or is a classic already.)

So what it means when the movie appears to be "one-third good" is that, on average, people like it better than about a third of the movies they've seen but not as much as about two-thirds of the movies they've seen.

I'm not influenced by movie ratings. If I think that I'm going to like a movie, I go and see it, or rent it.

It can be good in some ways and bad in others. A star rating should indicate whether there were more good things than bad things, or more bad things than good. In practice, the quality of a film depends in large part on its capacity to affect people, and people are decidedly contrary, so star ratings will often say as much about the reviewer as they do about the film.

I don't bother with film ratings myself, they merely show someone else's opinion, which is almost certain to be different from mine.

For the people who don't have the time or the patience to read a review, a number is necessary.

Also, aspects of a movie can be bad, and other parts of it can be good, so a ratio measuring that goodness is not totally illogical.

It's subjective, but it's not impossible to find a reviewer whose point of view resembles yours. With movie prices as they are I don't want to waste time on a "Vanilla Sky" or "Transformers".

The "3.7" number is probably an average of several scores (e.g. a 5 for the plot-line, a 2 for special effects, etc.)

Ratings are useful, as a movie can be good but not as good as another. That's why I think two ratings should be used: One to answer the question "Should I watch this movie?" and the other to compare the movie to other movies. Hence, a movie worth watching would have a five (out of five), while it may only have a 3 in terms of comparison, so it isn't the "best movie ever".